Neural Circuits & Behavior Process Report // Gioele La Manno - "Towards a fast and imaging-free approach for spatial transcriptomics: a matter of sampling "

There is a growing interest in the development of techniques that provide spatial expression profiles of several genes on the same tissue slice. The most recent imaging-based methods, such as multiplexed single-molecule FISH, can achieve high throughput using custom detection setups. The specific technical requirements to perform these methods and their cost make them challenging to transfer. Despite efforts to overcome this problem, we currently lack a technique allowing to mesure the spatial transcriptome of tissues with the same ease we perform conventional bulk or single-cell transcriptomics. In this talk, I propose a method that localizes molecules in tissues without using imaging. Through a combination of statistical modelling, image reconstruction, and optimization, we can obtain a genome-wide atlas of gene expression using a cheap and straightforward tissue sampling scheme.