In this webinar, team will discuss a study performed on lymph node tissue sections taken from five patients using complementary spatial biology platforms: the GeoMx® Digital Spatial Profiler (DSP) and the CosMx™ Spatial Molecular Imager (SMI). With GeoMx DSP, they profiled the whole transcriptome within key structures of the lymph node, including the germinal center, mantle zones, medulla, and paracortex. With CosMx SMI, they analyzed lymph node samples with clear germinal center zonation, capturing data on 1000 transcripts and 63 proteins across serial sections.

Integrated results from GeoMx DSP and CosMx SMI showed that 643 pathways were enriched in dark and light zones of the germinal center or at their interface, as well as 139 key ligand-receptor interactions driving such pathways. For example, they found co-stimulation of CD28 was enriched within the light zone, and CosMx confirmed that CD86 ligands within light zone B cells were significantly co-localized with the CD28 receptors of the TfH cells of the germinal center. These findings shed light on interactions that happen at key immunological interfaces, which can be used to better understand the immune infiltrate in tumors and identify mechanisms of tumor immune evasion.

Learning Objectives:

• Explain the differences between spatial profiling and imaging with respect to spatial multi-omic analysis of tissue sections.
• Describe the different functional roles of the germinal center, mantle zones, medulla, and paracortex within the lymph node.
• Conceive a spatial multi-omic experiment to answer a question from your own field of study that could take advantage of the complementarity of spatial profiling and imaging.