By Sang Ho Kwon.
Recent advancements in spatially-resolved transcriptomics (SRT) technologies have ushered in a new era of possibilities for biological research. These technologies offer the unique ability to map biomolecular information within the native tissue architecture. Preserving the spatial resolution of genome-wide gene expression allows researchers to obtain a more holistic view of the tissue microenvironment, particularly the underlying molecular and cellular dynamics in a spatial-anatomical context, which is useful to understand the composition, states, and function of individual cell types, as well as their interactions with one another in a defined microenvironment.
By Brenda Pardo
A month ago, I started an enriching adventure by joining Leonardo Collado-Torres’ team at Lieber Institute for Brain Development. Since then, I have been working on modifying spatialLIBD, a package to interactively visualize the LIBD human dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPFC) spatial transcriptomics data (Maynard, Collado-Torres, Weber, Uytingco, et al., 2020). The performed modifications allow spatialLIBD to use objects of the VisiumExperiment class, which is designed to specifically store spatial transcriptomics data (Righelli and Risso, 2020).