Spatial transcriptomics

An open-source platform developed by researchers in Nikolaus Rajewsky’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center creates molecular maps from patient tissue samples with subcellular precision, enabling detailed study and potentially enhancing routine clinical pathology. The study was published in “Cell.”

Organoids help researchers understand biological processes in health and in disease. It is, however, difficult to influence the way in which they organize themselves into complex tissues. Now a group led by Nikolaus Rajewsky has found a new way to do so. They report their work in Nature Methods.

British and German scientists created the most comprehensive cell atlas of the human heart. As reported in the journal “Nature”, it is the first to include the cells from which the heartbeat originates. Among other things, this data will provide a reference for studies on cardiac arrhythmias.

This spring, the MDC, BIH and Charité hosted the first e:Med Summer School on single-cell- based systems medicine, with the goal of ensuring that basic findings in the field are translated into clinical practice. The event welcomed 20 young biomedical researchers, data scientists and clinicians from around the world.

How can a heart heal itself? And what determines the sex of a living organism? The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Consolidator Grants to Dr. Jan Philipp Junker and Dr. Darío Lupiáñez to tackle these questions. Each researcher will receive €2 million over five years for their research.

Spatially resolved transcriptomics are changing the way we understand complex tissues, as Nature Methods wrote when it crowned the technology “Method of the Year 2020". A SCOG virtual workshop has now provided an overview of the latest findings and developments in this exciting field.

By analyzing the gene expression of single cells, algorithms are able to not only reconstruct their original location in the tissue, but also to determine details about their function. Teams led by Kai Schmidt-Ott and Nikolaus Rajewsky have published their findings in JASN, using the kidney as an example.

MDC researchers received a $150,000 pilot project grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Neurodegeneration Challenge Network to investigate a defining feature of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).