GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News

We’ve all heard that every picture tells a story. But what if the picture is a stained or labeled tissue slide? In that case, the picture may be too sketchy to tell the sorts of stories many scientists would like to hear—stories about intracellular processes and intercellular communications. Not to worry! Tissue slides are now giving us more detailed information thanks to spatial omics technology. Indeed, there is so much information that we may have difficulty making sense of it all. And it is here that GEN has a story to tell. The story’s theme? The search for meaning. The story’s heroes? Intrepid scientists and biomarker developers. The supporting characters? Giant data sets and machine learning software. That’s all we’ll say for now. (No spoilers here.) But we should note that spatial omics is part of a new scientific genre, one that’s all about data-driven insights. As this issue of GEN shows, such insights are being sought in cancer research, precision medicine, and gene editing applications.