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Genomics

Imaging-based spatial transcriptomics goes electric

Nature Methods volume 19, page 1338 (2022)Cite this article

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Researchers use electric fields to transfer RNA from a tissue sample onto a surface for subsequent fluorescence in situ hybridization-based profiling of transcriptomes at the single-cell level.

Lars Borm, a graduate student in the lab of Sten Linnarsson at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and colleagues sought to tackle some of the issues with imaging-based approaches to improve the quality and throughput of tissue imaging while retaining cellular resolution. “We saw that methods that can image the transcriptome in tissue sections are incredibly powerful to reveal how cells are organized. However, these methods have a large bottleneck due to long imaging times, so that even the processing of very small areas, like part of the mouse brain, can take weeks. We want to study human samples, which are large, and therefore we sought to reduce the imaging time,” notes Borm of their motivation to begin their work.

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  1. Nature Methods https://www.nature.com/nmeth

    Rita Strack

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  1. Rita Strack
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Correspondence to Rita Strack.

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Strack, R. Imaging-based spatial transcriptomics goes electric. Nat Methods 19, 1338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01678-x

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