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Call for papers - Advances in spatial transcriptomics for understanding development and disease

Guest Editors:
Stefania Giacomello: SciLifeLab & KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Johanna Klughammer: Gene Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany
Xiang Zhou: University of Michigan, USA

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 31 May 2024


Genome Biology is calling for submissions to our Collection on "Advances in spatial transcriptomics for understanding development and disease". This collection aims to highlight recent progress in the field of spatial transcriptomics, with a focus on how the emerging technologies are improving our understanding of the cellular processes and molecular mechanisms underlying developmental processes and disease states.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Stefania Giacomello: SciLifeLab & KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Dr Giacomello is Principal Investigator at SciLifeLab, Sweden, and Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Her research group studies how cell localization influences biological processes across different kingdoms through the use of single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. 

Johanna Klughammer: Gene Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany

Dr Klughammer is Associate Professor for Systems Immunology in the Department of Biochemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), Germany. Her lab specializes in using high-dimensional data including single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to study cellular communities in health and disease with the ultimate goal of better understanding and ultimately fixing pathological conditions.

Xiang Zhou: University of Michigan, USA

Dr Zhou is Associate Professor in the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at University of Michigan, USA. He is also Assistant Director at University of Michigan Precision Health. Before joining UM, he was a Williams H. Kruskal Instructor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago, USA. Dr Zhou's research is primarily focused on developing statistical methods and computational tools for genetic and genomic studies. These studies often involve large-scale and high-dimensional data; examples include genome-wide association studies and various functional genomic sequencing studies such as bulk and single cell RNA sequencing, bisulfite sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics.

About the collection

Genome Biology is calling for submissions on the collection "Advances in Spatial Transcriptomics for Understanding Development and Disease". This collection aims to highlight recent progress in the field of spatial transcriptomics, with a focus on how the emerging technologies are improving our understanding of the cellular processes and molecular mechanisms underlying developmental processes and disease states.

Spatial transcriptomics is a rapidly evolving field that combines high-throughput sequencing with spatial localization information to generate spatially resolved transcriptome maps of tissues and organs. This approach provides a unique opportunity to study gene expression patterns in their native spatial context, allowing for the identification of novel cell types, signaling pathways, and gene regulatory networks involved in organogenesis, tissue differentiation, and disease processes.

The collection will consider articles showcasing the latest findings in spatial transcriptomics, including but not limited to:

•    Methodological advances and development of novel bioinformatic tools for the analysis of spatial transcriptomics data 
•    Applications of spatial transcriptomics to study the molecular mechanisms underlying normal development and disease states
•    Integration of spatial transcriptomics data with other omics datasets, such as proteomics, metabolomics, and epigenomics to enable further insights into a wide range of biological processes 

We encourage submissions from a wide range of research areas, including developmental biology, cancer biology, immunology, neuroscience, and computational biology. Articles that incorporate multi-omics approaches or use spatial transcriptomics in combination with other imaging modalities are also welcome.

Please use the online submission system and indicate in your covering letter that you would like the manuscript to be considered for the "Advances in spatial transcriptomics for understanding development and disease" collection. If you would like to inquire about the suitability of a manuscript for consideration, please email a pre-submission inquiry to editorial@genomebiology.com.

Image credit: Dmitry / stock.adobe.com

  1. Spatial molecular data has transformed the study of disease microenvironments, though, larger datasets pose an analytics challenge prompting the direct adoption of single-cell RNA-sequencing tools including no...

    Authors: Dharmesh D. Bhuva, Chin Wee Tan, Agus Salim, Claire Marceaux, Marie A. Pickering, Jinjin Chen, Malvika Kharbanda, Xinyi Jin, Ning Liu, Kristen Feher, Givanna Putri, Wayne D. Tilley, Theresa E. Hickey, Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat, Belinda Phipson and Melissa J. Davis
    Citation: Genome Biology 2024 25:99
    Content type: Short Report Published on:

  2. The spatial organization of molecules in a cell is essential for their functions. While current methods focus on discerning tissue architecture, cell–cell interactions, and spatial expression patterns, they ar...

    Authors: Clarence K. Mah, Noorsher Ahmed, Nicole A. Lopez, Dylan C. Lam, Avery Pong, Alexander Monell, Colin Kern, Yuanyuan Han, Gino Prasad, Anthony J. Cesnik, Emma Lundberg, Quan Zhu, Hannah Carter and Gene W. Yeo
    Citation: Genome Biology 2024 25:82
    Content type: Method Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of original Research, Method, Short Report, Review, and Database article types. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines and have formatted your submission correctly. 

To submit your manuscript to this Collection, please use our online submission system and indicate in your covering letter that you would like the article to be considered for inclusion in the "Advances in spatial transcriptomics for understanding development and disease" Collection.

If you would like to inquire about the suitability of a manuscript for consideration, please email a pre-submission inquiry to editorial@genomebiology.com.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editor or Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.