Bioinformatics Seminar
Time: 11AM
Venue: Davis Auditorium and Online
30 June 2026
Spatial characterization of the fallopian tube progenitor cell niche by MERSCOPE
Xueyi DongWEHI
High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC), the most lethal subtype of ovarian cancer, originates from the fallopian tube (FT) epithelium, yet the progenitor cell population that maintains this epithelium and its supporting niche remain poorly characterised. Previous work in WEHI Breast Cancer Lab identified Tspan8 as a marker of bipotent, long-lived epithelial progenitor cells restricted to the base of distal FT folds, and implicated fibroblast-derived Wnt signalling as a key niche input through single cell RNA-seq and functional assays. However, the spatial organisation of stromal cell populations relative to the Tspan8+ niche and the ligand–receptor interactions operating in situ could not be resolved from dissociation-based transcriptomics alone. In this seminar, I will present my bioinformatic analysis of a MERFISH-based spatial transcriptomics (MERSCOPE) dataset generated by the Breast Cancer Lab, comprising 6 wild-type mouse FT samples. Starting from pre-processed, segmented data, I performed multi-sample integration and cell type annotation, followed by spatial neighbourhood analysis to identify which stromal subtypes are physically enriched adjacent to each epithelial subcluster. I then applied spatially-aware ligand–receptor analysis to detect active cell–cell communication hotspots. The overall aim is to provide a spatially resolved map of the stromal architecture and intercellular signalling landscape of the mouse FT, and to identify candidate cell type interactions that support Tspan8+ progenitor cell maintenance.