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Accurately Deciphering Tissue Heterogeneity From Spatial Multi-Modal and Multi-Omics With STransformer.

Advances in spatially resolved technologies enable the simultaneous acquisition of diverse data modalities within a tissue slice while preserving critical spatial context, which presents unprecedented opportunities to decipher intricate tissue heterogeneity. However, existing computational approaches lack the intrinsic flexibility to universally process both spatial multi-modal and multi-omics data. Here, we introduce STransformer, a unified deep learning framework designed to seamlessly accommodate a comprehensive landscape of spatial data. By simultaneously capturing short-range cellular interactions and tissue-wide semantic patterns, it extracts robust representations to accurately dissect complex tissue heterogeneity. Systematic evaluations across diverse species, tissue types, and data modalities highlight its profound versatility. For spatial multi-modal data, STransformer delineates intricate anatomical structures in the human cortex, uncovers pathological mechanisms in Alzheimer's disease, and characterizes dynamic spatiotemporal developmental trajectories during chicken cardiogenesis. Scaling to spatial multi-omics data, STransformer synergizes spatial transcriptomic and proteomic profiles to decipher intricate immune microenvironments within the human tonsil, and jointly analyzes spatial epigenomic and transcriptomic data to infer regulatory mechanisms in the mouse embryonic brain. Consequently, STransformer serves as a highly versatile and robust analytical framework for advancing our understanding of tissue heterogeneity and disease pathogenesis.

Multiomics

transFusion: a novel comprehensive platform for integration analysis of single-cell and spatial transcriptomics.

MOTIVATION: Understanding spatial organization, intercellular interactions, and regulatory networks within the spatial context of tissues is crucial for uncovering complex biological processes and disease mechanisms. Spatial transcriptomics technologies have revolutionized this field by enabling the spatially resolved profiling of gene expression. 10× Visium has emerged as the predominant spatial technology, but its low resolution and the complexity of integrating multimodal datasets present significant analytical challenges, particularly for researchers with limited computational and statistical expertise. Current spatial transcriptomics analysis platforms generally fall short of effectively integrating multimodal data and maximizing the utility of spatial information-such as uncovering complex cellular spatial dependencies, multimodal gradient patterns, and spatial coexpression of ligand-receptor pairs and regulatory networks related to disease or biological states-thereby limiting their ability to provide comprehensive end-to-end analytical workflows when analyzing 10× Visium data. RESULTS: To address these limitations, we developed transFusion, a novel, advanced web-based platform specializing in the most comprehensive and effective integration analysis of scRNA-seq and 10× Visium spatial transcriptomics data. transFusion offers 12 key functions, from basic visualization to advanced analyses, including intercellular dependency analysis, ligand-receptor coexpression identification and visualization, and spatial multimodal gradient variation patterns. Two case studies were used to demonstrate transFusion's capabilities in exploring tissue architecture, intercellular communication, dependency networks, and multimodal gradient variation patterns with minimal computational skills and statistical expertise. transFusion provides a flexible and powerful framework for multimodal data integration analysis. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: transFusion is freely available at https://github.com/WQLin8/transFusion.

Spatial Transcriptomics

Interpretable data integration for single-cell and spatial multi-omics.

Integrating single-cell or spatial transcriptomic and epigenomic data enables scrutinizing the transcriptional regulatory mechanisms controlling cell fate. Current integration methods usually align multi-omics data into a shared latent space but fail to reveal the underlying connections between genes and regulatory elements. The correlation- or regression-based regulatory inference methods cannot dissect different transcriptional regulation codes for cells under different spatial and temporal states. To address both problems, we develop a feature-guided optimal transport (FGOT) method, which simultaneously uncovers cellular heterogeneity and their associated transcriptional regulatory links. FGOT also provides post hoc interpretability for existing integration methods. FGOT is applicable for paired/unpaired single-cell multi-omics data and paired spatial multi-omics data. Benchmarking and validating via histone modification data or three-dimensional (3D) genomics data show good robustness and accuracy in integration and inference of regulatory links. The method allows systematic screening of cell-state and spatial-location-specific regulatory elements in diseases at the single-cell level. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.

Single-Cell Analysis

Spatial transcriptomics-aided localization for single-cell transcriptomics with STALocator.

Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) techniques can measure gene expression at single-cell resolution but lack spatial information. Spatial transcriptomics (ST) techniques simultaneously provide gene expression data and spatial information. However, the data quality of the spatial resolution or gene coverage is still much lower than the quality of the single-cell transcriptomics data. To this end, we develop a ST-Aided Locator for single-cell transcriptomics (STALocator) to localize single cells to corresponding ST data. Applications on simulated data showed that STALocator performed better than other localization methods. When applied to the human brain and squamous cell carcinoma data, STALocator could robustly reconstruct the relative spatial organization of critical cell populations. Moreover, STALocator could enhance gene expression patterns for Slide-seqV2 data and predict genome-wide gene expression data for fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and Xenium data, leading to the identification of more spatially variable genes and more biologically relevant Gene Ontology (GO) terms compared with the raw data. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.

Single-Cell Analysis

Integrated Genomic and Proteomic Analysis Reveals T-B Lymphocyte Signatures in the MYCN Driven "Immune Desert" of Specific Neuroblastoma Subtypes.

AIMS: This study aims to systematically dissect how MYCN amplification shapes the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) in high-risk neuroblastoma, elucidating key mechanisms underlying immune evasion. METHODS: We performed an integrated multi-omics analysis of bulk RNA-seq (n = 721), single-cell RNA-seq (n = 9), proteomic data (n = 49) and spatial transcriptomics (Visium, with external validation in melanoma). Analyses included unsupervised clustering, cell-cell communication inference, transcriptional regulatory network reconstruction, and spatial proximity assessment to map the immune landscape. RESULTS: A distinct molecular subtype (Class C), defined by MYCN amplification and poor prognosis, exhibited a comprehensive "immune desert" phenotype characterized by low immune scores and minimal leukocyte infiltration. Single-cell analysis confirmed significant depletion of T and B lymphocytes within the Class C TME. Dysregulated transcriptional networks were identified, including upregulation of REL and EOMES in T cells-with EOMES potentially driving exhaustion via regulation of Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) genes, and REL inhibition enhancing cytotoxic function in vitro. A unique immunosuppressive B-cell subset (B7) engaged in enhanced crosstalk with exhausted T cells and harbored a MYC-centered network linked to cell cycle dysregulation and poor survival. Spatial transcriptomics revealed significant proximity between B7-active regions and Treg/exhaustion-enriched areas, externally validated in melanoma. Proteomic data validated elevated REL expression in MYCN-amplified tumors. CONCLUSION: This work delineates the immunosuppressive architecture of MYCN-driven neuroblastoma, revealing novel regulatory nodes within specific lymphocyte compartments. Integrating single-cell, spatial, and proteomic evidence, we propose REL inhibition as a therapeutic candidate, the EOMES/TRP axis as a bioinformatically supported hypothesis, and the B7/MYC hub as a hypothesis supported by transcriptomic and spatial evidence.

Humans

Unlocking the Full Potential of Spatial Omics in Plants: Practical Challenges, Solutions, and a Path Forward.

Spatial omics technologies are providing new opportunities for plant biology by enabling molecular profiling within structurally intact tissues, revealing spatially organised cell states, developmental gradients, and regulatory interactions. While spatial transcriptomics has driven early advances, the field is rapidly expanding toward integrated spatial multi-omics by combining single-cell and spatial transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data. These approaches offer new opportunities to study development, physiology, and plant biotic and abiotic interactions in spatially preserved cellular contexts. However, despite rapid adoption, the field remains constrained by plant-specific challenges when applying technologies largely developed for animal systems. Compared with animal systems, plant tissues pose additional challenges due to rigid cell walls, and diverse chemistries, complicating sample preparation, cell and subcellular segmentation, signal detection, and data integration. As a result, many studies rely on bespoke protocols and analysis pipelines that are often difficult to reproduce or generalise. Here, we provide a practical, solution-oriented synthesis of current bottlenecks across experimental and computational pipelines, highlight emerging strategies to overcome these limitations, and propose a roadmap for community-driven protocol sharing, benchmarking, and integration across spatial and multi-omics modalities. Addressing these challenges will be essential to establish spatial omics as a routine and scalable tool for plant biology.

Journal Article

OmicsTweezer: A distribution-independent cell deconvolution model for multi-omics Data.

Cell deconvolution estimates cell type proportions from bulk omics data, enabling insights into tissue microenvironments and disease. However, practical applications are often hindered by batch effects between bulk data and referenced single-cell data, a challenge that is frequently overlooked. To address this discrepancy, we developed OmicsTweezer, a distribution-independent cell deconvolution model. By integrating optimal transport with deep learning, OmicsTweezer aligns simulated and real data in a shared latent space, effectively mitigating data shifts and inter-omics distribution differences. OmicsTweezer is versatile, capable of deconvolving bulk RNA-seq, bulk proteomics, and spatial transcriptomics. Extensive evaluations on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate its robustness and accuracy. Furthermore, applications in prostate and colon cancer showcase OmicsTweezer's ability to identify biologically meaningful cell types. As a unified deconvolution framework for multi-omics data, OmicsTweezer offers an efficient and powerful tool for studying disease microenvironments.

Humans

Multimodal Analysis Reveals Aberrant Expression of SUMO2 and Its Significant Association With Key Mechanisms of Metabolic Pathways in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. However, the role of small ubiquitin-like modifier 2 (SUMO2), a core member of the small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) family, regarding its expression patterns and metabolism-related functions in HCC remains inadequately understood. METHODS: A multidimensional analytical framework was applied, integrating immunohistochemistry (153 HCC vs. 21 non-HCC samples), proteomics (159 paired samples), bulk transcriptomics (3240 HCC vs. 2267 non-HCC samples), single-cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) (10 HCC vs. 8 non-HCC samples), spatial transcriptomics, and external CRISPR/Cas9 functional genomics data. Systematic analyses included standardized mean difference (SMD), pathway enrichment, pseudotime trajectory inference, in silico knockout, cell-cell communication, metabolic flux scoring, immune infiltration, clinical correlation, drug sensitivity prediction, and molecular docking. RESULTS: At the protein level, immunohistochemistry (nuclear positivity) and external proteomic data collectively demonstrated consistent SUMO2 overexpression in HCC. Consistent upregulation was also observed at the mRNA level across large-scale cohorts. Single-cell RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics localized SUMO2 enrichment to malignant hepatocytes and tumor-dominant regions. CRISPR-mediated SUMO2 knockout suppressed proliferation in multiple HCC cell lines. Mechanistically, high SUMO2 expression was significantly associated with metabolic reprogramming involving glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, pyruvate metabolism, and the tricarboxylic acid cycle. SUMO2-high malignant hepatocyte subpopulations exhibited enhanced activity of the macrophage migration inhibitory factor signaling axis and enhanced iron-sensor interactions. Further, the immune infiltration analysis revealed a negative correlation between SUMO2 expression and M1 macrophages and a positive correlation between follicular helper T cells and regulatory T cells. Clinically, elevated SUMO2 levels were found to be associated with adverse prognostic features. Furthermore, high SUMO2 expression was associated with increased sensitivity to dasatinib, and molecular docking simulations predicted potential binding between SUMO2 and dasatinib, with a Vina score of -8.5 kcal/mol. CONCLUSIONS: SUMO2 is aberrantly expressed at the protein, mRNA, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomic levels in HCC and is significantly associated with metabolic reprogramming and altered migration inhibitory factor (MIF)-mediated intercellular communication, suggesting its potential as a novel biomarker for diagnosis and treatment.

Humans

Scalable, generalizable and uncertainty-aware integration of spatial multiomics across diverse modalities and platforms with SCIGMA.

Recent advances in spatial omics technologies have enabled simultaneous profiling of transcriptomic, proteomic, epigenomic, metabolomic and imaging data at high spatial resolution, offering unprecedented opportunities to dissect tissue complexity. However, integrating these diverse and large-scale spatial multimodal datasets remains a major computational challenge. We present SCIGMA, a scalable and generalizable deep learning framework for spatial multiomics integration. SCIGMA introduces an uncertainty-aware contrastive learning objective and multiview graph neural networks to preserve modality-specific signals while learning biologically meaningful joint representations. Unlike previous methods, SCIGMA provides spatially resolved uncertainty estimates, interpretably identifying regions of biological or technical heterogeneity. SCIGMA supports integration of up to five modalities, and its modular framework is extensible to future technologies with even more modalities. It also scales to more than 1 million spatial locations, enabling analysis of high-resolution datasets such as Visium HD and Xenium Prime. We evaluated SCIGMA across 19 datasets spanning 8 modalities, 10 tissues and 9 platforms. On benchmarkable datasets, SCIGMA outperformed other methods in spatial domain detection, modality preservation, feature reconstruction and reproducibility. SCIGMA identifies biologically meaningful structures, refined spatial domains and modality-specific regulatory programs, providing a robust, flexible and future-ready solution for scalable spatial multimodal integration.

Multiomics

Shared genetic basis and spatial cellular atlas of psoriasis and metabolic syndrome.

BACKGROUND: Psoriasis (PS) and metabolic syndrome (MetS) frequently co-occur. Characterizing their shared genetic architecture and spatially enriched cellular populations may clarify the context of their co-occurrence and generate hypotheses for functional validation. METHODS: We integrated genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics for PS, MetS, and five related components with spatially resolved single-cell transcriptomic data. Global and local genetic correlations were assessed using linkage disequilibrium score regression, genetic covariance analysis, high-definition likelihood, and local analysis of variant association. A bivariate causal mixture model quantified polygenic overlap. Conditional/conjunctional false discovery rate and composite-null pleiotropy analyses identified shared susceptibility loci. Finally, gsMap evaluated trait-associated enrichment across annotated embryonic tissues at single-cell resolution. RESULTS: Genetic approaches identified significant genome-wide correlations and polygenic sharing between PS, MetS, and its components. Local and cross-trait analyses identified region-specific signals and cross-validated shared loci. gsMap revealed trait-specific tissue enrichment. PS showed the strongest enrichment in the epidermis (pCauchy = 1.0573 × 10  - ⁴), adipose tissue (pCauchy = 1.5366 × 10 - ⁴), and liver (pCauchy = 1.0167 × 10 - ³). Across MetS, FBG, HDL-C, hypertension, and TG, enriched regions mainly involved the liver, adipose tissue, and epidermis. WC enrichment was predominantly observed in adipose tissue (pCauchy = 1.7823 × 10 - ⁴), with no significant liver or epidermal enrichment. CONCLUSION: Integrating GWAS with single-cell transcriptomic and spatial information characterized shared genetic architecture between PS and MetS-related phenotypes and their spatial enrichment patterns. These findings provide a framework for generating testable hypotheses about comorbidity biology and guiding future functional and clinical validation.

Psoriasis

A Molecularly Anchored Spatial Transcriptomic Framework for Precise CA1-Subiculum Parcellation and Region-Resolved Analysis in Alzheimer's Disease.

BACKGROUND: The precise molecular delineation of the interface between the Subiculum (Sub) and cornu ammonis 1 (CA1) is a challenge in hippocampal research, as conventional cytoarchitectural boundaries are often ambiguous and limit reproducible regional annotation. Here, we developed a molecularly anchored spatial transcriptomic framework to define CA1-Sub regional identities using high-definition spatial transcriptomics (Stereo-seq) and single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) references. FINDINGS: Using a human hippocampal Stereo-seq dataset from 12 donors, we established a data-driven parcellation framework that defines reproducible molecular features distinguishing CA1 and Sub while capturing the transition between these regions. FN1 was identified as a Sub-enriched marker in a subset of EX_Sub and, together with ETV1 and additional regional markers, enabled molecular assignment of CA1 and Sub identities across datasets. The Sub association of FN1 and ETV1 was further supported by human 10X Genomics spatial transcriptomics, mouse in situ hybridization data, and a mouse spatial transcriptomic dataset. Applying this framework to Alzheimer's disease (AD) tissues revealed region-specific transcriptional alterations across CA1 and Sub, including enrichment of mitochondrial energy metabolism-related transcripts in the Sub, suggesting exploratory transcriptional associations of altered metabolic function. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides a molecularly anchored framework for human CA1-Sub parcellation that complements conventional annotation. By defining regional molecular states while preserving the biological continuum across CA1-Sub interface, this approach enables more consistent regional analysis of human hippocampus tissue across donors, datasets, and disease conditions.

Journal Article

Sparse deconvolution of cell type medleys in spatial transcriptomics.

Mapping cell distributions across spatial locations with whole-genome coverage is essential for understanding cellular responses and signaling However, current deconvolution models aim to estimate the proportions of distinct cell types in each spatial transcriptomics spot by integrating reference single-cell data. These models often assume strong overlap between the reference and spatial datasets, neglecting biology-grounded constraints such as sparsity and cell-type variations, as well as technical sparsity. As a result, these methods rely on over-permissive algorithms that ignore given constraints leading to inaccurate predictions, particularly in heterogeneous or unmatched datasets. We introduce Weight-Induced Sparse Regression (WISpR), a machine learning algorithm that integrates spot-specific hyperparameters and sparsity-driven modeling. Unlike conventional approaches that neglect biology-grounded constraints, WISpR accurately predicts cell-type distributions while preserving biological coherence, i.e., spatially and functionally consistent cell-type localization, even in unmatched datasets. Benchmarking against five alternative methods across ten datasets, WISpR consistently outperformed competitors and predicted cellular landscapes in both normal and cancerous tissues. By leveraging sparse cell-type arrangements, WISpR provides biologically informed, high-resolution cellular maps. Its ability to decode tissue organization in both healthy and diseased states highlights WISpR's practical utility for spatial transcriptomics, particularly in challenging settings involving noise, sparsity, or reference mismatches.

Humans

IL1RAP Is Associated With an Inflammation-Immunity-Related State in Skin Cutaneous Melanoma: Integrative Evidence From Pan-Cancer Data and Melanoma Immunotherapy Cohorts.

BACKGROUND: The crosstalk between inflammation and immunity plays a central role in tumor progression, immune evasion, and therapeutic response. Interleukin-1 receptor accessory protein (IL1RAP) is a key adaptor in inflammatory signaling, yet its immunological relevance and clinical implications in skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) remain largely unexplored. METHODS: We performed an integrative analysis combining pan-cancer and melanoma-focused datasets. Bulk transcriptomic, single-cell, spatial transcriptomic, genomic alteration, pharmacogenomic, and clinical survival data were obtained from TCGA, GTEx, GEO, ENA, and other public resources. IL1RAP expression was evaluated across cancer types in relation to diagnostic performance, immune subtypes, survival outcomes, functional pathway activity, immune-genomic states, somatic alterations, and drug-response metrics. Melanoma-focused analyses examined immune infiltration, methylation-derived tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (MeTIL) scores, and exploratory survival associations in five treatment cohorts; the survival groups were defined using cohort-specific optimal cutoffs rather than median splits. RESULTS: IL1RAP expression differed between tumor and normal tissues in multiple cancers, although the direction and magnitude varied by cancer type. Pan-cancer survival associations were likewise context dependent. Single-cell and spatial transcriptomic resources indicated cell-type and spatial heterogeneity of IL1RAP expression within tumor microenvironments. Pathway, immune-genomic, and pharmacogenomic analyses identified exploratory associations with functional states, genomic features, and drug-response metrics. In SKCM, IL1RAP expression was associated with several immune-infiltration estimates and higher MeTIL scores. Across five melanoma immunotherapy cohorts, the direction and magnitude of the overall survival associations varied substantially. CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective integrative analysis suggests that IL1RAP may mark an inflammation-immunity-related state in SKCM. The heterogeneous associations across cancers and melanoma treatment cohorts support further validation but do not establish IL1RAP as a causal regulator, a treatment-response predictor, or a therapeutic target.

IL1RAP

The burgeoning spatial multi-omics in human gastrointestinal cancers.

The development and progression of diseases in multicellular organisms unfold within the intricate three-dimensional body environment. Thus, to comprehensively understand the molecular mechanisms governing individual development and disease progression, precise acquisition of biological data, including genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and epigenome, with single-cell resolution and spatial information within the body's three-dimensional context, is essential. This foundational information serves as the basis for deciphering cellular and molecular mechanisms. Although single-cell multi-omics technology can provide biological information such as genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and epigenome with single-cell resolution, the sample preparation process leads to the loss of spatial information. Spatial multi-omics technology, however, facilitates the characterization of biological data, such as genome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and epigenome in tissue samples, while retaining their spatial context. Consequently, these techniques significantly enhance our understanding of individual development and disease pathology. Currently, spatial multi-omics technology has played a vital role in elucidating various processes in tumor biology, including tumor occurrence, development, and metastasis, particularly in the realms of tumor immunity and the heterogeneity of the tumor microenvironment. Therefore, this article provides a comprehensive overview of spatial transcriptomics, spatial proteomics, and spatial metabolomics-related technologies and their application in research concerning esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, and colorectal cancer. The objective is to foster the research and implementation of spatial multi-omics technology in digestive tumor diseases. This review will provide new technical insights for molecular biology researchers.

Humans

stDyer-image improves clustering analysis of spatially resolved transcriptomics and proteomics with morphological images.

MOTIVATION: Spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) and spatially resolved proteomics (SRP) data enable the study of gene expression and protein abundances within their precise spatial and cellular contexts in tissues. Certain SRT and SRP technologies also capture corresponding morphology images, adding another layer of valuable information. However, few existing methods developed for SRT data effectively leverage these supplementary images to enhance clustering performance. RESULTS: Here, we introduce stDyer-image, an end-to-end deep learning framework designed for clustering for SRT and SRP datasets with images. Unlike existing methods that utilize images to complement gene expression data, stDyer-image directly links image features to cluster labels. This approach draws inspiration from pathologists, who can visually identify specific cell types or tumor regions from morphological images without relying on gene expression or protein abundances. Benchmarks against state-of-the-art tools demonstrate that stDyer-image achieves superior performance in clustering. Moreover, it is capable of handling large-scale datasets across diverse technologies, making it a versatile and powerful tool for spatial omics analysis. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code of stDyer-image and detailed tutorials are available at https://github.com/ericcombiolab/stDyer-image.

Proteomics

Cardiomyocyte-Specific Plakophilin-2 Loss Is Sufficient to Induce Aging and Senescence of Nonmyocytes: Relevance to Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy.

BACKGROUND: Pathogenic variants in PKP2 are the most common cause of familial arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy. This study tests whether plakophilin-2 (PKP2) deficiency only in cardiomyocytes is sufficient to provoke premature aging and proinflammatory senescence in nonmyocyte, cardiac resident cells. METHODS: We studied mice with cardiomyocyte-specific, tamoxifen-activated loss of PKP2 (cardiomyocyte-specific conditional knockout of plakophilin-2) using conventional and multiplex imaging, cytokine arrays, epigenetic clocks, spatial transcriptomics, expansion and structured illumination microscopy, and correlative data analysis. We examined nonmyocytes and cardiomyocytes for premature aging and senescence. RESULTS: We observed senescence-associated heterochromatin foci in nonmyocytes, predominantly in cells positive for α-smooth muscle actin staining. Cytokines in media of nonmyocyte cells were consistent with senescence-associated secretory phenotype. Epigenetic clocks identified premature aging. Multiplex immunohistochemistry showed nonmyocyte cells in niches, intermingled with cardiomyocytes. Spatial transcriptomics showed overrepresentation of senescence-associated secretory phenotype-related transcripts, predominantly in myocyte-rich areas of the left ventricle. Senescence-associated heterochromatin foci and increased epigenetic age were not found in cardiomyocytes from cardiomyocyte-specific conditional knockout of plakophilin-2 hearts, although we observed structural features associated with premature aging. Cross-reference analysis showed correlation between the cardiomyocyte-specific conditional knockout of plakophilin-2 cardiac proteome and that of mice 5 or 6 times their chronological age, as well as transcriptional signatures of neurodegenerative diseases. CONCLUSIONS: Loss of PKP2 expression only in adult cardiac myocytes is sufficient to induce proinflammatory senescence in nonmyocytes, and overall premature cardiac aging. This is the first study to intersect cellular senescence and premature aging with desmosomal arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathies. We speculate that cell-agnostic molecular signatures, biomarkers, and pharmacology of senescence and of neurodegenerative diseases may be relevant to diagnose or treat PKP2 arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy.

Animals

Striping artifact removal in VisiumHD data through nuclear counts modeling.

MOTIVATION: 10x Genomics VisiumHD enables spatial transcriptomics at 2 µm × 2 µm resolution but exhibits slide-specific, non-periodic striping artifacts due to lane-width variability. These multiplicative row/column effects distort bin total counts and can bias downstream analyses. The state-of-the-art destriping approach is the normalization procedure used as a preprocessing step in bin2cell; it applies sequential high-quantile row- then column-wise normalization, which is asymmetric and can introduce edge effects/macro-stripes and distortions of large-scale total-count structure. RESULTS: We propose a statistical destriping approach that leverages nuclei segmentation from the co-registered H&E image. Assuming transcript abundance is constant within each nucleus, we model bin counts with a negative binomial distribution whose mean is a product of a nucleus-specific concentration and row- and column-specific stripe-factors reflecting lane-width variation. We fit all parameters in a generalized linear modeling framework with cross-validated regularization on stripe-factors and iterative dispersion estimation, and use the fitted parameters to correct the observed counts into a destriped image. On synthetic data with known ground truth, our method improves stripe-factor estimation accuracy and reduces error in corrected counts relative to bin2cell and bin2cell-derived baselines. Across four public VisiumHD slides, it consistently lowers striping intensity while substantially better preserving biological signal present in the large-scale global count structure and avoiding the artifacts introduced by other methods. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: All source code and links to publicly available data used for this study are available at https://github.com/paolamalsot/destriping-GLM.

Artifacts

Decoding the spatiotemporal patterns of food spoilage microbial communities: Integrating multi-omics and artificial intelligence to enable precision preservation.

In the global food supply chain, food wastage caused by spoilage has resulted in significant economic losses, food shortages, and environmental pressure. This process is fundamentally driven by the spatiotemporal dynamics of microbial communities. However, traditional research methods struggle to elucidate the complex mechanisms of spatial heterogeneity, interspecies interactions, and functional succession. This limits the development of effective preservation strategies. This review systematically reviews the cutting-edge progress of integrating multi-omics technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to study food spoilage microbial communities, breaking through this bottleneck. We propose an intelligent theoretical framework that could potentially analyze microbial metabolic activities and predict dynamic shelf life if implemented. The conceptual framework integrates multidimensional data, including spatial metabolomics, temporal metatranscriptomics, single-cell transcriptomics, and longitudinal metagenomics. It can also be combined with AI models, such as graph neural networks. The article elaborates on the principles and applications of spatio-temporal monitoring technologies, such as nano secondary ion mass spectrometry, hyperspectral imaging, and the Internet of Things sensing. Through illustrative cases of typical perishable foods, it also explores how such a multi-omics - AI system might be applied to spoilage warning and precise intervention. Additionally, the article addresses the current challenges in data coverage, model generalization, and federated learning implementation. Then the research further explores emerging areas such as engineered probiotics, edge AI, and microfluidic sensing. These areas are targeted at transforming food preservation from an empirical control approach to a data-driven, precise regulatory framework. This transformation provides theoretical support and technical approaches for developing a smart, sustainable food preservation system.

Multiomics