Decoding cardiac homeostasis and injury: the evolving landscape of spatial transcriptomics

Area of Science:

• Cardiovascular Biology
• Molecular Biology
• Genomics

Background:

• The heart's function depends on the spatial arrangement of its cells.
• Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides cell type information but loses spatial context.
• Spatial transcriptomics (ST) recovers gene expression data within its tissue context.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the evolving field of spatial transcriptomics for heart research.
• To categorize and discuss current ST technologies.
• To explore future directions in spatial multi-omics for cardiovascular studies.

Main Methods:

• Sequencing-based ST methods (e.g., Visium, Stereo-seq) for transcriptome-wide analysis.
• Imaging-based ST methods (e.g., MERFISH, Xenium, CosMx) for subcellular resolution and sensitivity.
• Emerging spatial multi-omics techniques including proteomics and chromatin accessibility.

Main Results:

• ST enables mapping gene expression to histological coordinates in the heart.
• Applications reveal spatial architecture in healthy and injured hearts.
• New multi-omics approaches are expanding spatial profiling capabilities.

Conclusions:

• Spatial transcriptomics is revolutionizing cardiovascular research by preserving tissue architecture.
• Integrating multi-modal spatial data is key to building comprehensive heart atlases.
• Computational challenges remain in analyzing complex spatial datasets.