SpatioTemporal Omics Consortium: a global effort for biological discovery across species, space and time

In this Comment we introduce the SpatioTemporal Omics Consortium (STOC), a global, open network collaborating to integrate spatial and temporal omics across species, development, disease and evolution.

The pace of innovation in spatial technologies has been extraordinary, rapidly transforming our ability to study biological systems within their native tissue environments. Throughout the history of biology, major advances have occurred when new measurement technologies meet conceptual frameworks that allow data to be compared, integrated and generalized. From early microscopy to the Human Genome Project and, more recently, single-cell genomics, transformative progress has followed moments when scale, standardization and coordination have enabled unprecedented discovery beyond the capability of any individual laboratory1. Spatial omics represents the next inflection point, extending molecular measurements into their native tissue contexts and revealing how cellular states, interactions and functions are organized in space.