Dear Colleagues,

The ability to understand how cellular regulatory networks function in normal cells and malfunction in disease states plays an important role in both the diagnosis and therapy of diseases. In many cases, the location of specific cells or molecules within an organ or an organism is crucial for physiological or pathological states. Therefore, it is important to develop technologies that enable spatially resolved detection and quantification of different biomolecules at a single-cell resolution.

Single-cell (sc-) assays such as flow cytometry, sc-RNA-sequencing, or sc-ATAC-sequencing, though providing high content analysis of many targets, do not provide the crucial spatial information. Furthermore, cells might change their properties in the course of the isolation and preparation of cell suspensions, which is a prerequisite for these methods. Other approaches such as immunohistochemistry or in situ hybridization suffer from the low number of detectable target molecules, even though they could generate results with spatial resolution.

Therefore, there is an increasing demand to develop novel assays that could enable high-throughput detection and quantification of multiple targets in biological samples with spatial information preserved. This Special Issue aims to both discuss the current status in the field of spatial omics and share novel approaches that could boost the field to the next level.

Dr. Johannes A. Schmid
Dr. Lu Xiao
Guest Editors

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• spatial transcriptomics
• spatial proteomics
• spatial lipidomics
• multiplexed immunofluorescence
• multiplexed in situ hybridization
• molecular barcoding
• image analysis
• in situ sequencing
• fluorescent probes