Spatial transcriptomics sequencing technology deepens our understanding of the diversity of cell behaviors, fates and states within complex tissue, which is often determined by the fine-tuning of regulatory network functional activities. Therefore, characterizing the functional activity within tissue space is helpful for revealing the functional features that drive spatial heterogeneity, and understanding complex biological processes. Here, we describe a database, SPathDB (http://bio-bigdata.hrbmu.edu.cn/SPathDB/), which aims to dissect the pathway-mediated multidimensional spatial heterogeneity in the context of functional activity. We manually curated spatial transcriptomics datasets and biological pathways from public data resources. SPathDB consists of 1689 868 spatial spots of 695 slices from 84 spatial transcriptome datasets of human and mouse, which involves 36 tissues, and also diseases such as cancer, and provides interactive analysis and visualization of the functional activities of 114 998 pathways across these spatial spots. SPathDB provides five flexible interfaces to retrieve and analyze pathways with highly variable functional activity across spatial spots, the distribution of pathway functional activities along pseudo-space axis, pathway-mediated spatial intercellular communications and the associations between spatial pathway functional activity and the occurrence of cell types. SPathDB will serve as a foundational resource for identifying functional features and elucidating underlying mechanisms of spatial heterogeneity.

中文翻译：

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SPathDB：空间通路活动图谱的综合数据库


空间转录组学测序技术加深了我们对复杂组织内细胞行为、命运和状态多样性的理解，这通常是由调节网络功能活动的微调决定的。因此，表征组织空间内的功能活动有助于揭示驱动空间异质性的功能特征，并理解复杂的生物过程。在这里，我们描述了一个数据库 SPathDB （http://bio-bigdata.hrbmu.edu.cn/SPathDB/），它旨在剖析功能活动背景下通路介导的多维空间异质性。我们从公共数据资源中手动整理了空间转录组学数据集和生物途径。SPathDB 由来自人类和小鼠的 84 个空间转录组数据集的 695 个切片的 1689 868 个空间点组成，涉及 36 个组织，以及癌症等疾病，并提供对这些空间点的 114 998 条通路的功能活动的交互式分析和可视化。SPathDB 提供了五个灵活的接口来检索和分析跨空间点功能活性高度可变的通路、通路功能活动沿伪空间轴的分布、通路介导的空间细胞间通讯以及空间通路功能活性与细胞类型发生之间的关联。SPathDB 将作为识别功能特征和阐明空间异质性的潜在机制的基础资源。