Our genome plays an essential role in our well-being, which STOmics helps us understand by revealing how our cells relate to one another and how our genetic makeup can make us more susceptible to certain diseases.

We are overwhelmed with different alternatives to improve our wellness: from Pilates and Keto diets to juice cleanses, the options are limitless. While there is no shortcut to achieving a healthy life, there is something for everyone to choose from.

However, life is not fair. Someone can develop a cancer at a young age despite regular exercise and healthy eating while someone else lives a long, healthy life despite smoking and drinking alcohol every day. How is this possible? 

While no one is encouraged to live an unhealthy lifestyle, our genome plays a leading part in designating our health.

SpatialTemporal Omics (STOmics) provides a chance to detect how our genetic makeup makes us susceptible for certain diseases or conditions. Through its technology—Stereo-seq, we have an opportunty for a detailed mapping of the space and time context of the disease pathogenesis at cellular resolution.

In other words, STOmics can help us investigate our genes that make us prone to diseases more accurately than other technologies have been able to. This is vital for identifying people who are more susceptible to certain diseases, as well as informing the course of action that disease will take. This is notable since our genome plays the most important part in constructing our well-being.

Diseases are four-dimensional. Whether the disease is cancer, inflammation or degenerative, to treat and prevent them we need detailed mapping of the space and time contexts of disease pathogenesis at cellular resolution. Without this detailed understanding, our health can never be fully understood to prevent and treat diseases in the most effective way.

BGI Group’s Stereo-seq spatial multi-omics technology brings a revolutionary change to this mapping. “Stereo-seq can detect over 25,000 genes simultaneously and tell us what has changed in all genes with unprecedented precision. This enables us to accurately classify cancers by gene expression, cell type and cellular microenvironment, and define each cancer subtype, enabling accurate detection,” explains Dr Liu Longqi of BGI-Research.

Beyond disease detection, Stereo-seq can help identify targets for cancer treatment and help with the monitoring of the process of cancer treatment, aiding in the evaluation of the treatment’s effectiveness.

Our health lies deeper in our genes than what is constructed from our daily habits and diets. This is not meant to discourage our attempts at creating a healthy lifestyle through trends surrounding health, but rather point out the effectiveness of Stereo-seq in understanding diseases and their treatment. 

So, in the end, our lifestyle choices do not guarantee a long and healthy life. Understanding cells in our body and how they interact is the key to understanding diseases. STOmics helps us see the blueprint of the disease with a higher precision at a molecular and cellular level, giving us a prerequisite for a more accurate diagnosis.