A Guide to the Benefits of Spatial ATAC-seq for Cancer Discovery

Tumor heterogeneity remains a formidable challenge in cancer research and treatment, manifesting from inter-patient variability to intra-tumor clonal diversity. This heterogeneity complicates understanding of disease progression and therapeutic response. At the molecular level, chromatin dysregulation is a key driver of heterogeneity: aberrant chromatin states influence gene expression, cell identity, and tumor microenvironment (TME) interactions, all of which contribute to resistance pathways and metastasis.

Traditional bulk assays average out critical information across cells, obscuring crucial spatial and cellular differences. High-resolution approaches—such as spatial ATAC-seq—are needed to map chromatin accessibility with tissue architecture retained, enabling discovery of the epigenetic mechanisms that underpin cancer initiation, progression, and treatment resistance.

Learn more in our white paper about how AtlasXomics and its spatial ATAC-seq technology are helping researchers tackle this challenge.