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Abstract Spatial omics technologies have made significant advances in recent years, improving our understanding of the spatial localization of cells and intercellular interactions. Intercellular interactions are essential for maintaining proper tissue function and homeostasis, and dysregulation of these interactions can contribute to various diseases, including cancer and autoimmune disorders. Ligand proteins, one of the signaling molecules responsible for cell-cell interactions, bind to cell surface receptors and trigger intracellular signaling pathways. The effective range of ligand signaling, i. e. the extent to which a cell spatially and directly transmits information via the ligand, has not been systematically studied, although it may determine the occurrence of cell-cell interactions. The authors have previously developed methodologies combining spatial transcriptomics and single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze intercellular interactions at the single-cell level in spatial dimensions. Additionally, we have devised a technique to model the spatial diffusion of ligands from spatial transcriptomics and estimate the spatial range of ligand action. In this study, we used these developed methods to elucidate events in the tumor microenvironment of brain metastatic lung cancer tissue. Specifically, an integrated analysis of metastatic brain tumor samples was performed using visium and single-cell data from the same patient. The results suggest the presence of a heterogeneous microglial subpopulation, including clusters enriched in cytokines and chemokines for angiogenesis and wound healing, clusters associated with immune tolerance via IL-10 signaling, clusters enriched in gene sets related to phagocytosis, antigen processing, and antigen presentation, and clusters related to clearance of pathogens and residues. The presence of homogeneous microglial subpopulations was suggested. Furthermore, these subpopulations exhibited different spatial distributions, suggesting that they interact with surrounding cancer cells through different mechanisms. Citation Format: Haruka Hirose, Takahiro Tsuji, Yasuhiro Kojima, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Yoshiki Arakawa, Hiroaki Ozasa, Hiroaki Wake, Teppei Shimamura. Integrated analysis of scRNAseq and spatial omics in brain metastatic lung cancer tumor tissue abstract. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts) ; 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84 (6Suppl): Abstract nr 7362.
Hirose et al. (Fri,) studied this question.