Leveraging geographic information systems for spatial transcriptomics
Work Group
Project Lead(s)
Project Status
Complete
Project Deliverables
Implement a GIS database-backend to represent and analyse spatial transcriptomics data
Collaborator Name
Harvey Mudd College
HMS Department
Center for Computational Biomedicine
Project Description
This project started with structured explorations of the data, simple algorithms to identify cells and anatomical structures. The data generated experimentally is very large, and there will be “big data” problems that will need to be addressed. From there, the team and liaisons worked together to determine the most promising follow-up paths. On one hand, the team determined how much work is required (and how much of it is automatable) to make cellular-level data digestible by GIS software. In addition, the team also explored GIS applications’ scripting-extensions in order to support meaningful and/or novel analyses and visualizations. Assessing the extent to which the more complex and much larger biological data affects performance was a major accomplishment.