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[Report] Visualization and analysis of gene expression in tissue sections by spatial transcriptomics

ScienceNOW - Fetched: June 30th, 2016, 3:00pm UTC

Analysis of the pattern of proteins or messengerRNAs (mRNAs) in histological tissue sections is a cornerstone in biomedical research and diagnostics. This typically involves the visualization of a few proteins or expressed genes at a time. We have devised a strategy, which we call “spatial transcriptomics,” that allows visualization and quantitative analysis of the transcriptome with spatial resolution in individual tissue sections. By positioning histological sections on arrayed reverse transcription primers with unique positional barcodes, we demonstrate high-quality RNA-sequencing data with maintained two-dimensional positional information from the mouse brain and human breast cancer. Spatial transcriptomics provides quantitative gene expression data and visualization of the distribution of mRNAs within tissue sections and enables novel types of bioinformatics analyses, valuable in research and diagnostics. Authors: Patrik L. Ståhl, Fredrik Salmén, Sanja Vickovic, Anna Lundmark, José Fernández Navarro, Jens Magnusson, Stefania Giacomello, Michaela Asp, Jakub O. Westholm, Mikael Huss, Annelie Mollbrink, Sten Linnarsson, Simone Codeluppi, Åke Borg, Fredrik Pontén, Paul Igor Costea, Pelin Sahlén, Jan Mulder, Olaf Bergmann, Joakim Lundeberg, Jonas Frisén

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