New review highlights spatial technologies in advanced brain mapping

Understanding how molecular changes shape brain function and disease requires more than measuring genes in bulk tissue. The brain contains highly diverse cell populations organized into complex anatomical and microenvironmental niches, making it difficult to capture its biology with conventional approaches alone.

Published in EXO – Beyond the Cell, a review examines how advances in single-cell and spatial multi-omics are helping researchers address this challenge by integrating multiple molecular layers while preserving cellular or tissue context.

Led by researchers from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), the Federal University of São Paulo, and collaborating institutions in Brazil, the review, titled "Single-Cell and Spatial Multi-omics for Mapping the Brain Across Molecular Layers," surveys recent applications spanning transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and spatial profiling.

The authors highlight how single-cell multi-omics can reveal regulatory relationships that are difficult to resolve from transcriptomic data alone. In studies of Alzheimer's disease, for example, integrated epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses have linked changes in chromatin organization to neuronal vulnerability and disease progression. In Parkinson's disease and psychiatric disorders, multi-omic studies have helped characterize cell-type- and region-specific changes involving neurons, microglia, and oligodendrocytes.