NFDI4BIOIMAGE Calendar Cover 2025:
Image from the NFDI4BIOIMAGE Calendar Cover 2025.
The image is a visualization showing the integration of multimodal data including a spinning disk confocal image and gene expression data from a spatial transcriptomic experiment on a human medulloblastoma sample. The microscopy image of the tissue with the nuclei in white has been overlayed with the result of the cell segmentation colored according to the assigned cell type (immune cells: red, stromal cells: violet, brain cells: cyan/blue, tumor cells: green). A subset of transcripts for three genes whose expression varies across the different cell types in the tissue have been represented as colored dots (CD4 (immune cells): red, PTCH1 (tumor cells): green, AQP4 (brain cells): blue).
Rademacher, Anne (); Huseynov, Alik (); Bortolomeazzi, Michele (); Wille, Sina Jasmin (); Schumacher, Sabrina (); Sant, Pooja (); Keitel, Denise; Okonechnikov, Konstantin (); Ghasemi, David R. (); Pajtler, Kristian W. (); Mallm, Jan-Philipp (); Rippe, Karsten ()
Image Metadata (using REMBI template):
Study
Study description
Comparison of spatial transcriptomics technologies for medulloblastoma cryosection
Study type
Spatial Transcriptomics (Xenium) on medulloblastoma cryosections
Study Component
Imaging method
Xenium and Spinning disk confocal microscopy
Study component description
Datasets with raw and processed data from the study "Comparison of spatial transcriptomics technologies for medulloblastoma cryosections" including Xenium and spinning disk confocal microscopy data
Biosample
Identity
MB266
Biological entity
Human cerebellum from a patient with Medulloblastoma with extensive nodularity
Organism
Homo sapiens
Specimen
Experimental status
Patient sample
Preparation method
10 µm cryosections were acquired using the cryostar NX50 with a cutting temperature of -15 °C. Tissues were section in 10 µm slices and four samples were placed on one Xenium slide. Subsequently, the tissue was fixed with PFA according to the manufacture´s protocol. Tissues were permeabilized with SDS, incubated in 70% ice cold methanol and washed with PBS. Hybridization of the human generic brain panel with 70 add-on genes (Supplementary Dataset 1) was performed at 50°C in a Bio-Rad C1000 touch cycler for 20 hours. Washing, ligation and amplification steps were carried out according to the manufacturer’s instructions. ROIs were selected according to the tissue area excluding non-tissue covered tiles. Each transcript was imaged in a bright state five times across 60 cycle-channels (15 cycles x 4 channels). After the run on the Xenium analyzer slides were removed and buffer exchanged with PBS-T for further storage at 4°C.
Signal/contrast mechanism
Fluorescence
Channel 1 – content
DAPI
Channel 1 – biological entity
Nuclei (DNA)
Image acquisition
Instrument attributes
Imaging of RNAscope samples and reimaging of Xenium slides by SDCM was conducted on an Andor Dragonfly 505 spinning disk confocal system equipped with a Nikon Ti2-E inverted microscope and a CFI P-Fluor 40X/1.30 oil objective or a Plan Apo 60x/1.40 oil objective. Multicolor images were acquired with the following laser lines 405 nm (DAPI), 488 nm (Alexa 488, eosin), 561 nm (Atto 550), 637 nm (Atto 647) 730nm (Alexa 750).
Image acquisition parameters
Images were recorded at 16-bit depth and with 1024x1024 pixels dimensions (pixel size: 0.217 µm) using an iXon Ultra 888 EM-CCD camera. The region of interest was selected based on the DAPI signal and 50 z-slices were acquired with a step size of 0.4 µm (20 µm z-range) per field of view (FOV). Tiles were imaged with a 10% overlap to ensure accurate stitching.
Image data
Type
Figure
Format & compression
PNG
Size description
8800x8788+0+0 pixels (Primary image)
Pixel/voxel size description
0.217 µm (Primary image)
Channel information
RGB
Image processing method
Tiles were imaged with a 10% overlap to ensure accurate stitching. Subsequently, a flatfield-correction was conducted based on the DAPI channel and stitching and registration of the tiles was conducted with Fiji. First, SDCM image stacks were subjected to a maximum intensity projection, followed by flat field and chromatic aberration correction using a custom script. Next, image tiles were stitched using the “Grid/Collection Stitching” plugin. DAPI images from SDCM were registered to MC or Xenium widefield images using “Register Virtual Stack Slices” with Affine feature extraction model and the Elastic bUnwarpJ splines registration model. In case of further staining, images were transformed via Transform Virtual Stack slices employing the transformation file of the DAPI registration.
Image Correlation
Spatial and temporal alignment
The region of interest was selected based on the DAPI signal and 50 z-slices were acquired with a step size of 0.4 µm (20 µm z-range) per field of view (FOV). Tiles were imaged with a 10% overlap to ensure accurate stitching. Subsequently, a flatfield-correction was conducted based on the DAPI channel and stitching and registration of the tiles was conducted with Fiji (https://github.com/RippeLab/MBEN/tree/main/stitching) (https://github.com/RippeLab/MBEN/tree/main/Registration).
Most of the analysis and visualization (including tidyverse, data.table, ggridges R packages) was done in R 4.2.2. Raw data were processed using technology-specific corporate pipelines (custom pipeline was used for MC). For each technology Seurat objects of the sample data and analysis results were created using the Seurat (v. 4.3.0) R package (https://github.com/scOpenLab/spatial_analysis/tree/main)
to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 truetrue
Captions
Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents
{{Information |description=NFDI4BIOIMAGE Calendar Cover 2025: Image from the NFDI4BIOIMAGE Calendar Cover 2025. The image is a visualization showing the integration of multimodal data including a spinning disk confocal image and gene expression data from a spatial transcriptomic experiment on a human medulloblastoma sample. The microscopy image of the tissue with the nuclei in white has been overlayed with the result of the cell segmentation colored according to the assigned cell type (immune...