Explore the vast range of titles available.

Spatial transcriptomic studies are becoming increasingly common and large, posing important statistical and computational challenges for many analytic tasks. Here, we present SPARK-X, a non-parametric method for rapid and effective detection of spatially expressed genes in large spatial transcriptomic studies. SPARK-X not only produces effective type I error control and high power but also brings orders of magnitude computational savings. We apply SPARK-X to analyze three large datasets, one of which is only analyzable by SPARK-X. In these data, SPARK-X identifies many spatially expressed genes including those that are spatially expressed within the same cell type, revealing new biological insights.

Solid tumors are spatially heterogeneous in their genetic, molecular, and cellular composition, but recent spatial profiling studies have mostly charted genetic and RNA variation in tumors separately. To leverage the potential of RNA to identify copy number alterations (CNAs), we develop SlideCNA, a computational tool to extract CNA signals from sparse spatial transcriptomics data with near single cellular resolution. SlideCNA uses expression-aware spatial binning to overcome sparsity limitations while maintaining spatial signal to recover CNA patterns. We test SlideCNA on simulated and real Slide-seq data of (metastatic) breast cancer and demonstrate its potential for spatial subclone detection.