Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Mining in 3D and Virtual Reality Environments with VR-Omics

Abstract

Spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) technologies produce complex, multi-dimensional data sets of gene expression information that can be obtained at subcellular spatial resolution. While several computational tools are available to process and analyse SRT data, no platforms facilitate the visualisation and interaction with SRT data in an immersive manner. Here we present VR-Omics, a computational platform that supports the analysis, visualisation, exploration, and interpretation SRT data compatible with any SRT technology. VR-Omics is the first tool capable of analysing and visualising data generated by multiple SRT platforms in both 2D desktop and virtual reality environments. It incorporates an in-built workflow to automatically pre-process and spatially mine the data within a user-friendly graphical user interface. Benchmarking VR-Omics against other comparable software demonstrates its seamless end-to-end analysis of SRT data, hence making SRT data processing and mining universally accessible. VR-Omics is an open-source software freely available at: https://ramialison-lab.github.io/pages/vromics.html