MechanoMaST - a multimodal pipeline for spatially registering mechanical and transcriptomic tissue data

Authors

Decker, L., Olisov, D., Schleussner, N., Wiethoff, H., Schmidt, T., Nienhueser, H., Pausch, T. M., Korbel, J. O., Diz-Munoz, A.

Abstract

Spatial-omics workflows enable molecular analysis within tissue spatial context. Despite the prognostic value of tissue stiffness, these approaches have not incorporated direct, mechanical measurements. This omission reflects several challenges, including sample requirements, low throughput, specialized equipment, and complex data registration. Here, we introduce mechanoMaST (mechanics mapped to spatial transcriptomics), the first workflow to combine absolute mechanical measurements with spatial-omics. It pairs atomic force microscopy-based nanoindentation stiffness maps with spatial transcriptomics maps from adjacent tissue cryosections. The two modalities are then computationally co-registered to enable direct spatial correlation at 100 um resolution, with mapping accuracy quantified through error propagation, providing ground-truth mechanical data directly linked to spatial gene expression. We demonstrate mechanoMaST in human colorectal cancer liver metastasis, generating a spatial resource from 10 patients and revealing a four-gene stiffness signature. mechanoMaST is readily adaptable to other tissues across development and disease, and extendable to additional spatial-omics modalities in adjacent sections.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 01 Sep 2026.

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