Multiomics sequencing goes spatial

Microfluidic channels provide a means to deliver barcodes encoding spatial information to a tissue, which allows co-profiling of gene expression and proteins of interest in a spatially resolved manner.

Back in 2013, Rong Fan from Yale University was intrigued by a conversation with colleague Kathryn Miller-Jensen: they noticed that trypsinizing cancer cells off the substrate could perturb the measurements of the signaling network. Since then, Fan has been thinking about how to fix and measure cellular states on a substrate or in a tissue without cell dissociation. Barcoding strategies were introduced in massively parallel single-cell RNA sequencing and have substantially advanced the single-cell field. Yet, Fan says, “I was never satisfied with the random barcoding approach.” He hoped to have a method for ‘deterministic barcoding’ of a tissue — delivering barcodes to a given cell in a specific location.