Spatial transcriptomics tools allow for regional exploration of heterogeneous muscle pathology in the pre-clinical rabbit model of rotator cuff tear

Conditions affecting skeletal muscle, such as chronic rotator cuff tears, low back pain, dystrophies, and many others often share changes in muscle phenotype: intramuscular adipose and fibrotic tissue increase while contractile tissue is lost. The underlying changes in cell populations and cell ratios observed with these phenotypic changes complicate the interpretation of tissue-level transcriptional data. Novel single cell transcriptomics has limited capacity to address this problem because muscle fibers are too long to be engulfed in single cell droplets and single nuclei transcriptomics are complicated by muscle fibers’ multinucleation. Therefore, the goal of this project was to evaluate the potential and challenges of a spatial transcriptomics technology to add dimensionality to transcriptional data in an attempt to better understand regional cellular activity in heterogeneous skeletal muscle tissue. Fresh and 6 years old snapfrozen healthy and tenotomized rabbit supraspinatus muscle sections were mounted on 10x Visium slides