Principal investigator
Stefania Giacomello
Spatial transcriptomics methods across tissues and model systems.
Giacomello is Associate Professor in Spatial Biology at KTH and a group leader at SciLifeLab, working on sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics across kingdoms: her question is how the location of a cell shapes what it does, whether that cell belongs to an animal, a plant or a microbe.
She joined SciLifeLab as a postdoc in 2013 and contributed to the original development of Spatial Transcriptomics, then extended it to plants. She co-led a spatiotemporal single-cell study of the developing human heart (Cell 2019).
Her group developed Spatial metaTranscriptomics (Nat Biotechnol 2023), which quantifies bacteria, fungi and the host's whole transcriptome simultaneously in the same tissue section and so resolves host–microbe interactomes in place. Other projects include spaceflight studies of gene expression in the mouse brain (Nat Commun 2024) and miniaturised spatial transcriptomics for organisms as small as the parasitic worm Brugia malayi.
She studied biotechnology at the University of Udine, worked in plant genomics at NIAB in Cambridge, returned for a PhD in plant genomics, and served as a senior bioinformatician at the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden before starting her group. Her work is ERC-supported.