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Pinpointing a spatial address for RNA profiles in tissues

Knowing the gene-expression pattern of individual cells can unlock their identity. A refined method for generating cellular RNA profiles offers a way to obtain such data at a high level of spatial resolution in intact tissues.
  1. Samantha A. Morris

    1. Samantha A. Morris is in the Departments of Developmental Biology and of Genetics, and in the Center of Regenerative Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, St Louis, Missouri 63110, USA.

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Monitoring messenger RNA in cells is a way to gather data that provides many biological insights. Improvements in the methods for detecting cellular mRNA are helping to provide more-detailed pictures of gene expression in the cells of a particular tissue. Writing in Science, Rodriques et al.1 describe a new approach to assessing cellular RNA that they term Slide-seq. This versatile technique couples high-throughput RNA sequencing with a way to capture spatial information about the location of the analysed cells in tissues.

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Nature 569, 197-199 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01405-1

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