Inferring a spatial code of cell-cell interactions across a whole animal body.

ABSTRACT: Cell-cell interactions shape cellular function and ultimately organismal phenotype. Interacting cells can sense their mutual distance using combinations of ligand-receptor pairs, suggesting the existence of a spatial code, i.e., signals encoding spatial properties of cellular organization. However, this code driving and sustaining the spatial organization of cells remains to be elucidated. Here we present a computational framework to infer the spatial code underlying cell-cell interactions from the transcriptomes of the cell types across the whole body of a multicellular organism. As core of this framework, we introduce our tool cell2cell, which uses the coexpression of ligand-receptor pairs to compute the potential for intercellular interactions, and we test it across the Caenorhabditis e

SUBMITTER: Armingol E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9714814 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature