M3-Guest Lecture by Prof. Jan Tchorz on Human Liver Spatial Transcriptomics
On Monday, the 18th of May, Prof. Tchorz held a presentation about HuLISST – a Human Liver Cell Atlas Integrating Single Cell and High-Resolution Spatial Transcriptomics in the frame of the M3- lecture series, where we welcome important and impactful scientists from Tübingen and above, regularly.
Prof. Dr. Jan Tchorz is a Professor at the Medical Faculty and Director of the Institute of Physiology I at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He studied biology at the University of Halle, Germany, and earned his PhD at the Institute of Physiology in Basel, Switzerland. Before returning to academia in 2025, Dr. Tchorz served as Associate Director at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, where he led liver research groups in Basel (CH) and Cambridge (USA). His research focuses on the metabolic and cellular physiology, regeneration and tumor development. Using advanced transgenic models, organoid systems, genetic screening and spatial profiling of patient samples, his team investigates cellular identity, metabolic function and zonation, as well as maladaptive repair mechanisms. Dr. Tchorz is Associate Editor at Journal of Hepatology and in the Editorial board of other leading journals. He is also a guest Professor at NoPSC in Oslo, where he is working with Tom H. Karlsen on dissecting pathophysiological mechanisms of PSC.
Complex organ function relies on the spatial coordination of cellular identities and metabolic programs. In the liver, metabolic programs are segregated along the porto-central axis to maintain systemic homeostasis, yet the status of this spatial logic in human chronic liver disease (CLD) still remained unknown.
Actually, the research group around Prof. Tchorz presents the Human Liver Integrated Single-cell and Spatial Transcriptomics (HuLISST) atlas, a high-resolution multimodal reference of the healthy and diseased liver. By developing an entropy-based framework to quantify spatial order, the group identified a profound loss of zone-specific metabolic programs and collapse of metabolic zonation across CLD etiologies. Spatial analyses and lineage tracing revealed a metabolic identity switch in peri-injury hepatocytes and transient metabolic reprogramming during biliary-to-hepatocyte transdifferentiation. They found that CLD is characterized by a spatial redistribution of WNT and RSPO ligands, marked by their depletion from the healthy parenchymal gradient and ectopic enrichment within injury niches. This signaling translocation is associated with the loss of pericentral metabolism and the emergence of aberrant hepatocyte identities.
To sum it up, the study Dr. Tchorz presented, establishes a high-resolution spatial reference of the diseased human liver and reveals fundamental principles by which spatial signaling and cell plasticity reshape metabolic organization in CLD!
We thank Prof. Tchorz a lot for coming and holding the lecture as a part of our M3-lecture series!