New Spatial Transcriptomics Tool Maps Gene Expression Across Tissue

<p>Tissue boundaries are among the most consequential structures in biology. Where one tissue ends and another begins, cells with sharply different identities must be kept apart, yet they must also communicate, exchange signals, and coordinate their behavior so that organs can grow into their correct shapes. When these borders fail, the consequences range from structural birth defects to invasive cancers. Now, a team of researchers has introduced a computational workflow called REBOSEP that reads gene expression along the seams between tissues, and they have used it to build a detailed atlas of gene activity across five boundary regions of the embryonic mouse brain, published in the open-access journal iScience.</p><p>The study, led by Vincent Hammer and Stephan Ossowski, tackles a problem that has grown more urgent as spatial transcriptomics has matured.