SC2Spa: a deep learning based approach to map transcriptome to spatial origins at cellular resolution

Abstract

Background

Understanding cellular heterogeneity within tissues hinges on knowledge of their spatial context. However, it is still challenging to accurately map cells to their spatial coordinates.

Results

We present SC2Spa, a deep learning-based approach that learns intricate spatial relationships from spatial transcriptomics (ST) data. Benchmarking tests show that SC2Spa outperformed other predictors and accurately detected tissue architecture from transcriptome. SC2Spa successfully mapped single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to Visium assay, providing an approach to enhance the resolution for low resolution ST data. Our test showed that SC2Spa performs well for various ST technologies and robust to spatial resolution. In addition, SC2Spa can suggest spatially variable genes that cannot be identified from previous approaches.

Conclusions

SC2Spa is a robust and accurate approach to provide single cells with their spatial location and identify spatially meaningful genes.