JJ Tang

[Jian Ma @jmuiuc]

We asked a basic unanswered question in tissue biology: Can the many molecular exchanges between neighboring cells be organized into reusable communication programs - much like genes into pathways?

We introduce SpiderNet, which learns cell-cell meta-interactions (MIs): directed sender->receiver programs linking sender regulators, ligand-receptor bridges, and receiver responses, while mapping where each program is active in tissue. Across diverse contexts, MIs recur, form multicellular relays, predict neighboring-cell responses to perturbation, and connect local signaling to tissue states and phenotypes.

We hope MIs provide an intermediate language for spatial omics, moving from catalogs of local contacts toward interpretable, comparable, and eventually perturbable programs of multicellular regulation.

📚 Preprint: https://t.co/kYYKZgtKoR
🚀 Led by the amazing Junjie Tang @JJTang_1995 in the lab.