12  Spatial registration

12.1 Overview

Spatial registration methods use gene expression profiles for cell populations of interest from single-cell RNA sequencing data as a reference, and use these single-cell expression profiles to ‘spatially register’ the spatial coordinates of observations corresponding to these cell populations in spatial transcriptomics data.

For spot-based ST data, this is the same as spot deconvolution using reference-based methods (Chapter 11).

For molecule-based ST data, this may be used as an alternative to clustering to identify cell populations after aggregation to cellular resolution (Chapter 10).