Uncover spatially informed shared variations for single-cell spatial transcriptomics with STew

MotivationThe recent spatial transcriptomics (ST) technologies have enabled characterization of gene expression patterns and spatial information, advancing our understanding of cell lineages within diseased tissues. Several analytical approaches have been proposed for ST data, but effectively utilizing spatial information to unveil the shared variation with gene expression remains a challenge. ResultsWe introduce STew, a Spatial Transcriptomic multi-viEW representative learning method, to jointly analyze spatial information and gene expression in a scalable manner, followed by a data-driven statistical framework to measure the goodness of model fit. Through benchmarking using Human DLPFC data with true manual annotations, STew achieved superior performance in both clustering accuracy and continuity of identified spatial domains compared with other methods. STew is also robust to generate consistent results insensitive to model parameters, including sparsity constraints. We next applied STew to various ST data acquired from 10x Visium and Slide-seqV2, encompassing samples from both mouse and human brain, which revealed spatially informed cell type clusters. We further identified a pro-inflammatory fibroblast spatial niche using ST data from psoriatic skins. Hence, STew is a generalized method to identify both spatially informed clusters and disease-relevant niches in complex tissues. AvailabilitySource code and the R software tool STew are available from github.com/fanzhanglab/STew. Contactfan.3.zhang@cuanschutz.edu Supplementary informationSupplementary data are provided.