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scider is an user-friendly R package providing functions to model the global density of cells in a slide of spatial transcriptomics data. All functions in the package are built based on the SpatialExperiment object, allowing integration into various spatial transcriptomics-related packages from Bioconductor. After modelling density, the package allows for several downstream analysis, including colocalization analysis, boundary detection analysis and differential density analysis.

The goal of `tpSVG` is to detect and visualize spatial variation in the gene expression for spatially resolved transcriptomics data analysis. Specifically, `tpSVG` introduces a family of count-based models, with generalizable parametric assumptions such as Poisson distribution or negative binomial distribution. In addition, comparing to currently available count-based model for spatially resolved data analysis, the `tpSVG` models improves computational time, and hence greatly improves the applicability of count-based models in SRT data analysis.

standR is an user-friendly R package providing functions to assist conducting good-practice analysis of Nanostring's GeoMX DSP data. All functions in the package are built based on the SpatialExperiment object, allowing integration into various spatial transcriptomics-related packages from Bioconductor. standR allows data inspection, quality control, normalization, batch correction and evaluation with informative visualizations.

This package addresses the mean-variance relationship in spatially resolved transcriptomics data. Precision weights are generated for individual observations using Empirical Bayes techniques. These weights are used to rescale the data and covariates, which are then used as input in spatially variable gene detection tools.

SpNeigh provides methods for neighborhood-aware analysis of spatial transcriptomics data. It supports boundary detection, spatial weighting (centroid- and boundary-based), spatially informed differential expression using spline-based models, and spatial enrichment analysis via the Spatial Enrichment Index (SEI). Designed for compatibility with Seurat objects, SpatialExperiment objects and spatial data frames, SpNeigh enables interpretable, publication-ready analysis of spatial gene expression patterns.

This packages simulates spatial transcriptomics data with the mean- variance relationship using a Gaussian Process model per gene.

The spatialHeatmap package offers the primary functionality for visualizing cell-, tissue- and organ-specific assay data in spatial anatomical images. Additionally, it provides extended functionalities for large-scale data mining routines and co-visualizing bulk and single-cell data. A description of the project is available here: https://spatialheatmap.org.

Method for identification of spatial domains and spatially-aware clustering in spatial transcriptomics data. The method generates spatial domains with smooth boundaries by smoothing gene expression profiles across neighboring spatial locations, followed by unsupervised clustering. Spatial domains consisting of consistent mixtures of cell types may then be further investigated by applying cell type compositional analyses or differential analyses.

This package analyze spatial transcriptomics data through cross-regional cell type-specific analysis. It selects regions of interest (ROIs) and identifys cross-regional cell type-specific differential signals. The ROIs can be selected using automatic algorithm or through manual selection. It facilitates manual selection of ROIs using a shiny application.

RankMap is a fast and scalable tool for reference-based cell type annotation of single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data. It uses ranked gene expression and multinomial regression to achieve robust predictions, even with partial gene coverage. Compatible with Seurat, SingleCellExperiment, and SpatialExperiment objects, RankMap offers flexible preprocessing and significantly faster runtime than tools like SingleR, Azimuth, and RCTD.

Method for scalable identification of spatially variable genes (SVGs) in spatially-resolved transcriptomics data. The method is based on nearest-neighbor Gaussian processes and uses the BRISC algorithm for model fitting and parameter estimation. Allows identification and ranking of SVGs with flexible length scales across a tissue slide or within spatial domains defined by covariates. Scales linearly with the number of spatial locations and can be applied to datasets containing thousands or more spatial locations.

This package contains the function to find marker genes for image-based spatial transcriptomics data. There are functions to create spatial vectors from the cell and transcript coordiantes, which are passed as inputs to find marker genes. Marker genes are detected for every cluster by two approaches. The first approach is by permtuation testing, which is implmented in parallel for finding marker genes for one sample study. The other approach is to build a linear model for every gene. This approach can account for multiple samples and backgound noise.

hoodscanR is an user-friendly R package providing functions to assist cellular neighborhood analysis of any spatial transcriptomics data with single-cell resolution. All functions in the package are built based on the SpatialExperiment object, allowing integration into various spatial transcriptomics-related packages from Bioconductor. The package can result in cell-level neighborhood annotation output, along with funtions to perform neighborhood colocalization analysis and neighborhood-based cell clustering.

Visualization functions for spatial transcriptomics data. Includes functions to generate several types of plots, including spot plots, feature (molecule) plots, reduced dimension plots, spot-level quality control (QC) plots, and feature-level QC plots, for datasets from the 10x Genomics Visium and other technological platforms. Datasets are assumed to be in either SpatialExperiment or SingleCellExperiment format.

The creation of effective visualizations is a fundamental component of data analysis. In biomedical research, new challenges are emerging to visualize multi-dimensional data in a 2D space, but current data visualization tools have limited capabilities. To address this problem, we leverage Gestalt principles to improve the design and interpretability of multi-dimensional data in 2D data visualizations, layering aesthetics to display multiple variables. The proposed visualization can be applied to spatially-resolved transcriptomics data, but also broadly to data visualized in 2D space, such as embedding visualizations. We provide this open source R package escheR, which is built off of the state-of-the-art ggplot2 visualization framework and can be seamlessly integrated into genomics toolboxes and workflows.

Intuitive framework for identifying spatially variable genes (SVGs) and differential spatial variable pattern (DSP) between conditions via edgeR, a popular method for performing differential expression analyses. Based on pre-annotated spatial clusters as summarized spatial information, DESpace models gene expression using a negative binomial (NB), via edgeR, with spatial clusters as covariates. SVGs are then identified by testing the significance of spatial clusters. For multi-sample, multi-condition datasets, we again fit a NB model via edgeR, incorporating spatial clusters, conditions and their interactions as covariates. DSP genes-representing differences in spatial gene expression patterns across experimental conditions-are identified by testing the interaction between spatial clusters and conditions.

CARD is a reference-based deconvolution method that estimates cell type composition in spatial transcriptomics based on cell type specific expression information obtained from a reference scRNA-seq data. A key feature of CARD is its ability to accommodate spatial correlation in the cell type composition across tissue locations, enabling accurate and spatially informed cell type deconvolution as well as refined spatial map construction. CARD relies on an efficient optimization algorithm for constrained maximum likelihood estimation and is scalable to spatial transcriptomics with tens of thousands of spatial locations and tens of thousands of genes.

BatchSVG is a method to identify batch-biased spatially variable genes (SVGs) in spatial transcriptomics data. The batch variable can be defined as sample, donor sex, or other batch effects of interest. The BatchSVG method is based on the binomial deviance model (Townes et al, 2019).