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About SpatialDM

SpatialDM (Spatial Direct Messaging, or Spatial co-expressed ligand and receptor Detected by Moran’s bivariant extension) is a statistical model and toolbox to identify the spatial co-expression (i.e., spatial association) between a pair of ligand and receptor.

Uniquely, SpatialDM can distinguish co-expressed ligand and receptor pairs from spatially separating pairs, and identify the spots of interaction.

With the analytical testing method, SpatialDM is scalable to 1 million spots within 12 min with only one core.

SpatialDM comprises two main steps:

1. global selection with spatialdm_global to identify significantly interacting LR pairs;

2. local selection with spatialdm_local to identify local spots for each interaction.

Please refer to our tutorials for details:

• Permutation-based SpatialDM (Recommended for small datasets, <10k spots).

• Differential analyses of whole interactome among varying conditions.

References

SpatialDM manuscript with more details is available on bioRxiv now and is currently under review.