Spatial enrichment

The primary utility of spatial enrichment is the automated detection of groups of biomolecules with enriched or depleted abundance in the profiled spatial features, and subsequently visualize these patterns in SHMs. Common use cases include the identification of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) with tissue-specific expression patterns or those with uniform expression across tissues. For detecting them, the software supports systematically identifying spatially enriched or depleted biomolecules that are significantly up or down regulated in one feature relative to the other features of interest. The stringency of this approach can be relaxed by allowing a user-definable number of outlier features. The statistical methods for detecting spatial DEGs include edgeR, limma, DESeq2 and distinct.