About STellaris

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has enabled comprehensive profiling of molecular signatures of diverse cell types. However, the spatial information was lost during the tissue dissociation step, hindering the further interpretation of crosstalk between different cell types that coordinates tissue formation and pathological states. Emerging spatial transcriptomics (ST) methods enable measuring gene expression while preserving spatial information. The expanding ST datasets offer the potential for serving as a reference atlas for guiding spatial mapping of existing scRNA-seq data, thereby increasing their value in deciphering intercellular communications in the spatial context.

STellaris is an integrated web server for accurate and flexible spatial mapping of user-uploaded scRNA-seq data. It is founded on a manually curated compilation of ST datasets across diverse organs, developmental stages and pathological states in humans and mice. With the inferred spatial information of single cells, STellaris can thus characterize spatial distances between cell type pairs and identify intercellular LRIs between them. Notably, the spatial construction of other single-cell omics data that were jointly profiled with the transcriptome can be resolved simultaneously if provided.

STellaris also provides a dataset browser tool for navigating ST datasets collected in our local database, as well as a gene search tool for retrieving gene expression characteristics from a spatial perspective.

STellaris is open and free for everyone to use and there is no login requirement. Please be assured that your submitted data will be kept private. We kindly request users to limit their requests to no more than 3 concurrent jobs when using this web server.

STellaris draws inspiration from and integrates several tools or methods that have been published earlier.

This project was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (National Key Research and Development Program of China, 2018YFA0801405 and 2019YFA0801801) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31871272 and 31801103).