UNRAVELING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TUMOR CELLS AND THEIR MICROENVIRONMENT USING HIGH-RESOLUTION SPATIAL TRANSCRIPTOMICS

M. Cordenonsi |Department of Molecular Medicine, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

During the last decade, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) methods paved the way for deep molecular analysis of normal and pathological tissues at unprecedented resolution. Single-cell molecular analyses allow to identify different cell types, including some never discovered before, and to have an insight to their ontogenetic relationships. Moreover, these data can also be used to infer the signals that different types of cells exchange with each other. Despite these advances, scRNA-seq data do not contain a crucial set of information, which is the spatial architecture of the analysed tissues and organs, as they are obtained through the dissociation of the original specimens at single-cell level. Without the knowledge of the spatial relationship between cells, it is difficult to get any insight on their functional interrelations and the workings of the entire cell ecosystem that compose a particular tissue. This problem is even more conspicuous for tumors, for which there is no prior knowledge on the structure of the tissue, as it varies from patient to patient. In recent years, new methods, generally referred as «spatial transcriptomics» have been developed to chart the high-detailed picture emerging from scRNA-seq analyses into tissue sections. Here I present a new study showing how high-resolution spatial transcriptomics helps to unravel the structure of tumor tissues, not only by charting the cell types identified by scRNA-seq on the tissue, but also allowing to make educated guesses on their functional relationships.