Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
10 March 2026
SMINT: A Unified Workflow for Integrative Spatial Multi-Omic Analysis of Tumor Tissue
Jurgen KrielWEHI
Integrating data across different spatial modalities—such as transcriptomics and metabolomics—remains a significant challenge due to difficulties in accurate cell segmentation and micrometer-precision alignment. In this seminar, I will present SMINT (Spatial Multi-omics INTegration), a unified computational and experimental framework designed to overcome these hurdles. Using IDH-mutatant glioma as a model, we demonstrate how SMINT aligns high-resolution spatial transcriptomics (10x Genomics Xenium) with spatial metabolomics (MALDI-IMS) to create single-cell multi-omic maps. I will discuss our findings on cell segmentation and alignment strategies and showcase how SMINT identifies distinct cellular neighborhoods at the tumor leading edge, revealing novel associations between oncogenic transcripts and metabolic signatures. This workflow provides a scalable foundation for generating testable biological hypotheses in cancer research and beyond.