Comparative Analysis of Packages and Algorithms for the Analysis of Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data

The technology to generate Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics (SRT) data is rapidly being improved and applied to investigate a variety of biological tissues. The ability to interrogate how spatially localised gene expression can lend new insight to different tissue development is critical, but the appropriate tools to analyse this data are still emerging. This chapter reviews available packages and pipelines for the analysis of different SRT datasets with a focus on identifying spatially variable genes (SVGs) alongside other aims, while discussing the importance of and challenges in establishing a standardised ‘ground truth’ in the biological data for benchmarking.