741-EdgeMap: for Intercellular Communication Components

Paper Talk · Apr 3, 2026 · 17m

This paper introduces EdgeMap, a new computational framework designed to show how intercellular communication contributes to the heritability of complex human diseases. While traditional genetic methods focus on how individual cells function in isolation, this research demonstrates that genetic risk is often concentrated at the signaling interfaces—or "edges"—where neighboring cells interact via ligand-receptor pairs. By integrating spatial transcriptomics with data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the authors successfully partitioned trait heritability into cell-intrinsic and…