Cells of a given type or tissue may appear similar and yet behave differently. In the brain, for example, neurons of the same subtype may play very different roles depending on their locations and connections.
In short, when it comes to specific cell functions, “spatial information is absolutely critical,” says gene-expression researcher Je Lee of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Researchers are therefore developing tools to examine the expression of multiple genes in tissue sections, and a technique called STARmap, developed by Xiao Wang, a postdoc in the lab of Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University, and colleagues, is the latest approach.
STARmap (Spatially Resolved Transcript Amplicon Readout Mapping) is “a significant step toward true 3-D gene expression analysis,” says molecular systems biologist Sten Linnarsson of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute who was not involved in the work. In the past, a researcher wanting to examine the expression of multiple genes at once in ...
