How Do We Visualize Space in Molecular Biology? A Study of Spatial Transcriptomics Visualization Practices

Abstract

A cell's identity depends on where it sits in tissue: for example, a macrophage behaves differently in a tumor core than at its edge. Spatial transcriptomics has transformed how we study this by recovering that lost coordinate, but it does so by producing data that is simultaneously high-dimensional, multimodal, and uncertain. Visualizing this combination is a hard problem in its own right, and one that warrants an assessment of how the field currently represents it, what has worked, and what is still missing. We surveyed 148 papers and 1,824 figure panels using a What-Why-How coding framework grounded in Munzner's nested model, connecting the data represented, the biological tasks motivating each visualization, and the design choices through which they are expressed; a subset of the surveyed work also contributed dedicated interactive visualization software that was not necessarily reflected in the static figures, and we looked at what interaction capabilities those tools supported as well. We close by outlining where the field stands and the challenges ahead for bioinformatics and visualization researchers to tackle together.