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21 July 2026 Ten years of mapping gene expression in tissues Spatially resolved transcriptomic technologies continue to enhance understanding of development and disease through a feedback loop involving academia and industry. By Jean Fan 0 Jean Fan Jean Fan is in the Center for Computational Biology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21211, USA. View author publications PubMed Google Scholar
‘Location, location, location!’ This adage highlights how the value of property is shaped by geographical context. It has relevance in biology, too: the outcomes of molecular programs that are encoded in gene expression are shaped by the context of the tissue in which a cell exists. Scientists had been looking for a way to profile gene expression at the level of the transcriptome (the entire set of RNA transcripts in a cell) while preserving the spatial resolution achievable with microscopy — in other words, a way to capture which genes are expressed, and where. One solution came in 2016 in a landmark paper in Science, in which Ståhl et al.1 introduced a technology that they called spatial transcriptomics.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02212-1
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Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.
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