understanding the organization of cells and tissues and how this organization influences function is a fundamental pursuit in life sciences research. over the years, technological advances hace shed much light on these aspects of biology. Sequencing approaches hace allowed us to learn about cell types and their heterogeneity in comples tissues, and methodological advances in microscopu including super-resolution and single-molecle imaging, hace transformed our understanding of cell and tissue structure and function,Our Method of the Year,spatially resolved transcriptomics, highlights how these technologies hace matrured and expanded to gice biologists excepetioal views of the biology of single cells while retaining information on spatial conctext.
Although we hace covered single-cell technologies before-including in 2013,when we featured single cell RNA and DNA sequencing and even just last year,with our selection of single-cell multimodal omics -our decision this year to highlight spatially resolved transcriptomics was unanimous because unlike the methods highlighted preciously,these methods are able to elycidate single-cell types while also retaining spatial information.This maintenance of spatial contest is crucial for understanding key aspects of cell biology,developmental biology,nerobiology,tumor biology and more,as specialized cell types and their specific organization are crucially tied to biological activity and remain poorly explored on the scale of whole tissues and organisms ,as such large consortia such as the human cell atlas and brain initiative cell census network are making use of spatially resolved transcriptomics technology with the ultimate foal of generating complete maps of large and complex tissues like the human brain. Brodly speaking,spatially resolced transcriptomics tiusdes are carried out one of two ways.Transcriptomes can be read our by microscopy through in situ sequencing or multiplexed fluorescence in sity hybridization.Alternaticely RNA is captured in a way that retains spatial information while sequnecing is done using ex sity RNA-seq.These approaches are often complementary and differ in their target coverage spatial resolution and throughput like all methods, they must be appropriately matched to their biological questions.
理解细胞和组织的组织以及这种组织如何影响功能是生命科学研究的基本追求。多年来，技术的进步使我们对生物学的这些方面有了更多的了解。测序方法使我们能够了解细胞类型及其在复杂组织中的异质性，显微技术的方法进步，包括超分辨率和单分子成像，改变了我们对细胞和组织结构和功能的理解。我们的年度方法“空间解析转录组学”强调了这些技术是如何成熟和扩展的，使生物学家在保留空间背景信息的同时对单细胞生物学有特殊的看法。
尽管我们已经介绍了单细胞技术——包括在2013年之前,当我们以单细胞RNA和DNA测序,甚至就在去年,我们选择单细胞多通道组学——今年我们的决定强调空间解决转录组是一致的,因为不像以前强调的方法,这些方法能够阐明单细胞的异质性和定义单元类型,同时保持空间信息。这种空间环境的维持对于理解细胞生物学、发育生物学、神经生物学、肿瘤生物学等的关键方面是至关重要的，因为特化的细胞类型和它们的特定组织与生物活性密切相关，但在整个组织和有机体的规模上仍然缺乏探索。因此，像人类细胞图谱和大脑倡议细胞普查网络(BICCN)这样的大型组织正在利用空间解析转录组学技术，其最终目标是生成像人脑这样的大型复杂组织的完整地图。
广义地说，空间解析转录组学研究有两种方法。转录组可以通过显微镜下的原位测序或多重荧光原位杂交(FISH)来读出。另一种方法是，当测序使用ex-situ RNA-seq完成时，以一种保留空间信息的方式捕获RNA。这些方法在目标覆盖范围、空间分辨率和吞吐量方面往往是互补的，并有所不同;像所有的方法一样，它们必须与生物学问题相匹配。
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