UMN Spatialomics Initiative accelerates research by uniting technical expertise in a single virtual hub

The University of Minnesota Spatialomics Initiative is a new coordinated effort that aims to accelerate spatialomic research at the UMN by bringing together all of the relevant technical expertise in a single virtual location. The collection of resources on this site was established to help researchers probe spatial interactions at the level of genomics and proteomics.

Spatialomic analysis is inherently cross-disciplinary, requiring expertise in histology, imaging, genomics/proteomics, and spatially-aware bioinformatics/biostatistics. Expertise in these areas is distributed across several different resource cores at the UMN, as are specialized spatialomic instruments. The distributed nature of tools and experts complicates the job of finding technologies and assessing which may be best suited to a specific research question. It can also make it hard for a researcher to understand who “owns” a specific stage of a project that spans multiple cores.

This initiative aims to lessen those barriers by:

• Providing a single, updated, comprehensive list of all spatialomic technologies available at the UMN
• Identifying the high-level pros and cons of these technologies to guide users to a preliminary short-list of tools
• Connecting those tools to specific staff in relevant core facilities
• Providing a convenient way to jointly contact relevant core facility staff for in-depth consultation with the aim of selecting a final workflow and initiating work

The staff of the Medical School Histology Core, the University Imaging Centers (UIC), the UMN Genomics Center (UMGC), and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) invite you to peruse these resources and provide feedback early and often so that we can improve the provision of spatialomic technologies, and thereby, progress in spatial biology at the UMN.