📌 Project Overview

The SYNC dashboard is an interactive visualization platform for exploring single-cell spatial transcriptomics data. It integrates dimensionality reduction (UMAP, t-SNE), cell clustering, gene expression analysis, and cell composition profiling into a single, intuitive dashboard.

Goal: Enhance interpretability of complex spatial datasets by connecting computational analysis with interactive, real-time visualization.

Implementation: Built with Plotly; available on GitHub

🔬 Key Features

1. Dashboard Structure

• Input Panel: Controls for choosing dimensionality reduction method (UMAP/t-SNE) and selecting the number of clusters.
• Spatial Plot: Displays tissue cell positions; supports selection of cells to highlight their embeddings.
• Dimensionality Reduction Panels: Displays the UMAP or t-SNE plots.
• Top Gene Expression Panel: Dot plots of top 10 genes per cluster, with dot size (prevalence) and color (expression level).

2. Interactive Visualization

• Select cells on spatial plots to highlight them in reduced-dimensional space.
• Hover interactions provide cell identity, type, and cluster info.
• Reset button restores views for iterative exploration

💡 Impact & Applications

• Simplifies exploration of tissue heterogeneity and spatial relationships at single-cell resolution.
• Supports developmental biology and disease research by integrating spatial context with transcriptional data

Future Improvements

• Gene Expression Overlay: Color-code cells by any chosen gene for quick insights

Contributors

Yeojin Kim, Aileen He, Jiaxun Li, Felix Rivera Moctezuma

More Links

• 💻 SYNC tutorial on GitHub