Spatial transcriptomic analysis of human dorsoal root ganglia neurons [Xenium]

Xenium platform was used for the spatial transcriptomic analysis of human DRG neurons, 100 marker genes were selected as the customized probe panel and hybridized to fresh frozen hDRG sections. Manual segmentation of each neuron soma was performed, based on expressions of pan-neuronal marker gene PGP9.5, satellite glia cell marker FAB7B, and the corresponding H.E. staining. In total, 1340 neurons were identified (excluding 75 region-of-interest with poor or unclear neuronal soma morphology in H & E staining) and clustered into 16 groups. The 16 clusters were assigned as different cell types based on marker genes expression. In the study presented here, four dorsoal root ganglia tissues from two healthy donors were used for Xenium spatial transcriptomics analysis, A hundred gene panel (including 87 neuronal genes from our single-soma sequencing dataset and 13 non-neuronal cell marker genes) were selected to perform spatial transcriptomics. The spatial distribution of these genes in neurons and non-neuronal cells was successfully profiled and quantified.