Poster Presentation 43rd Lorne Genome Conference 2022

Spatially resolved transcriptomics in immersive environments (#131)

Denis Bienroth 1 2 , Hieu T. Nim 1 3 4 , Dimitar Garkov 2 , Karsten Klein 2 , Sabrina Jaeger-Honz 2 , Mirana Ramialison 1 3 4 , Falk Schreiber 2 5
  1. Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Parkville, VIC, Australia
  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany
  3. Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
  4. System Biology Institute, Clayton, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
  5. Faculty of Information Technologies, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Spatially-resolved transcriptomics is an emerging class of high-throughput technologies that enable biologists to systematically interrogate the expression of genes together with spatial information.  Upon data acquisition, one major hurdle is the subsequent interpretation and/or visualisation of the acquired datasets. To address this challenge, we present VR-Cardiomics a novel data visualisation system with interactive functionalities designed to help biologists interpret spatially-resolved transcriptomics dataset. By implementing the system on two separate immersive environments: fish tank virtual reality (FTVR) and head-mounted display virtual reality (HMD-VR), biologists can interact with data in novel ways not previously possible, such as to visually explore the gene expression patterns of an organ, and to compare genes based on their 3D expression profiles. Further, we present a biologist-driven use-case, in which the immersive environments facilitate biologists to explore and compare the heart expression profiles between different genes.