Method of the Year: spatially resolved transcriptomics

By: Vivien Marx

If a researcher is making a smoothie, it might be snack time. Or it could be the moment to prepare a sample for bulk RNA sequencing, in which tissue is homogenized and analyzed to yield averaged gene expression from the mRNAs in a tissue’s cells — its transcriptome. When single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) was developed, it brought a more fine-grained assessment of each cell’s transcriptome.