Poster Presentation Multi-Omics Inaugural Conference 2022

VR-Omics: Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Exploration in Virtual Reality  (#131)

Denis Bienroth 1 2 , Natalie Charitakis 1 2 3 , Sabrina Jaeger-Honz 4 , Dimitar Garkov 4 , Karstein Klein 4 , Hieu T Nim 1 2 3 5 , Falk Schreiber 4 , Mirana Ramialison 1 2 3 5
  1. Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Parkville, VICTORIA, Australia
  2. reNEW , Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine, Melbourne , VIC, Australia
  3. Department of Paediatrics, Royal Children’s Hospital, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
  4. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
  5. Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Spatially resolved transcriptomics is an emerging class of high-throughput technologies that enable biologists to systematically investigate the expression of genes along with their spatial information.  Upon data acquisition, one major hurdle is the subsequent analysis, interpretation, and visualisation of the datasets acquired. To address this challenge, we present a novel data analysis and visualization framework called VR-Omics with interactive functionalities using either virtual reality or a common desktop solution for 3D visualisation. Supported are various technologies such as Visium and Xenium by 10X Genomics, STOmics by BGI, MERFISH by VIZGEN or Tomo-seq. VR-Omics is composed of an automated workflow designed to help biologists not only to visualise but also to analyse and interpret spatially resolved transcriptomics datasets. This allows biologists to interact with the data in novel ways not previously possible, which includes visually exploring the gene expression patterns of an organ and comparing genes based on their 3D expression profiles.