Sequencing-based Spatial Transcriptomics with scRNA-seq Sensitivity
The advent of spatial transcriptomics has dramatically expanded our ability to study the vast network of cell-cell interactions at the molecular level in tissue. Among current methods, sequencing-based approaches have great potential in discovery because of its unbiased capture of the whole transcriptome. In the last couple of years, the spatial resolution for the capture addresses has been significantly improved from 100 um to <1 um, well below the size of a mammalian cell. However, the capture efficiency has always been a pain point, ~one order of magnitude lower than that of single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). The low capture efficiency limits the depth and breadth of its applications in the study of complex biological systems and diseases. Here, we introduce Salus Spatial transcriptomic system (Salus-STS), which provides ~1 um capture resolution and a capture efficiency similar to those of scRNA-seq. Analysis with sub-cellular resolution (2 um) becomes practical for sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics.