Spatially resolved integrative analysis of transcriptomic and metabolomic changes in tissue injury studies
- Eleanor C. Williams
- Lovisa Franzén
- Martina Olsson Lindvall
- Gregory Hamm
- Steven Oag
- Muntasir Mamun Majumder
- James Denholm
- Azam Hamidinekoo
- Javier Escudero Morlanes
- Marco Vicari
- Joakim Lundeberg
- Laura Setyo
- Trevor M. Godfrey
- Livia S. Eberlin
- Aleksandr Zakirov
- Jorrit J. Hornberg
- Marianna Stamou
- Patrik L. Ståhl
- Anna Ollerstam
- Jennifer Y. Tan
- Irina Mohorianu
2026-01-07
Recent developments in spatially resolved -omics have enabled the joint study of gene expression, metabolite levels and tissue morphology, offering greater insights into biological pathways. Integrating these modalities from matched tissue sections to probe spatially-coordinated processes, however, remains challenging. Here we introduce MAGPIE, a framework for co-registering spatially resolved transcriptomics, metabolomics, and tissue morphology from the same or consecutive sections. We show MAGPIE’s generalisability and scalability on spatial multi-omics data from multiple tissues, combining Visium with MALDI and DESI mass spectrometry imaging. MAGPIE was also applied to new multi-modal datasets generated with a specialised sampling strategy to characterise the metabolic and transcriptomic landscape in an in vivo model of drug-induced pulmonary fibrosis and to link small-molecule co-detection with endogenous lung responses. MAGPIE demonstrates the refined resolution and enhanced interpretability that spatial multi-modal analyses provide for studying tissue injury especially in pharmacological contexts, and delivers a modular, accessible workflow for data integration.