Decoding Hierarchical Cell–Cell Communication in Spatial Multi-Omics with CellSTIC

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Abstract
Cell–cell communication coordinates tissue development, homeostasis, and immunity, yet defining signaling interactions within intact tissues remains challenging. Single-cell transcriptomics enables systematic ligand– receptor inference, but tissue dissociation removes spatial context and obscures local and region-specific signaling. Spatial transcriptomics and spatial multi-omics can recover communication in situ, although existing methods often incompletely integrate heterogeneous data or produce poorly interpretable ligand–receptor lists. Here we present CellSTIC, a framework that resolves cell–cell communication in spatial multi-omics as structured programs grounded in tissue architecture. CellSTIC integrates multimodal evidence from local neighborhoods and organizes interactions into a hierarchical semantic representation that remains traceable to underlying molecules. This enables analysis from individual ligand–receptor pairs to functional modules comparable across tissues, regions, and states. In simulations and diverse tissue datasets, CellSTIC recovered spatially coherent communication structures and domains, revealing immune, brain, developmental, and regenerative programs, and providing a general approach for generating mechanistic hypotheses in situ. Abstract Figure:
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62471378)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (82541006)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62171365)
  • Young Talent Support Plan of Xi'an Jiaotong University
  • Shaanxi Province Key Research and Development Projects (2024SF-GJHX-40)
  • Shaanxi Province Key Research and Development Projects (QCYRCXM-2022-209)

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