Please join us for next week’s Biostatistics & Medical Informatics seminar on Friday!
Time & Place: Friday, October 8 2021 at 12:00-1:00pm
Please note that this seminar is fully virtual.
Zoom Link: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/98511057424?pwd=TDlMMTZZYkZKTW9iSDdBWERnLzFBUT09
Title: Exploring tissue architecture using spatial transcriptomics
Presenter: Dr. Itai Yanai, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, New York University
Abstract: Deciphering the principles and mechanisms by which gene activity orchestrates complex cellular arrangements in multicellular organisms has far-reaching implications for research in the life sciences. Recent technological advances in next-generation sequencing- and imaging-based approaches have established the power of spatial transcriptomics to measure expression levels of all or most genes systematically throughout tissue space, and have been adopted to generate biological insights in neuroscience, development and plant biology as well as to investigate a range of disease contexts, including cancer. Similar to datasets made possible by genomic sequencing and population health surveys, the large-scale atlases generated by this technology lend themselves to exploratory data analysis for hypothesis generation. In this talk I will discuss spatial transcriptomic technologies and describe the repertoire of operations available for paths of analysis of the resulting data, particularly for questions relating to cancer biology. I will discuss how spatial transcriptomics provides a framework for studying how cancer cell states interact with the tumor microenvironment. Finally, I will discuss how spatial transcriptomic data are naturally amenable to integration with other data modalities, providing an expandable framework for insight into tissue organization.