GAMMI: graph-guided contrastive and adversarial integration of single-cell and spatial multi-omics data

Integrating single-cell and spatial multi-omics data is essential for resolving cellular identity, regulatory programs and tissue organization, yet remains challenging under realistic experimental designs. In practice, data are often incomplete, unpaired and partially overlapping across batches and platforms, resulting in mosaic settings where missingness, batch effects and limited correspondence are tightly coupled. Existing methods typically rely on shared cells, explicit anchors or post hoc mapping, and can become unstable as overlap diminishes or spatial structure is not explicitly modeled. Here we present GAMMI (Graph-guided Adversarial Mosaic Multi-omics Integration), a unified graph learning framework for mosaic integration of heterogeneous single-cell and spatial multi-omics data. Rather than performing direct cell or sample alignment, GAMMI learns biologically meaningful relational structure by jointly embedding cells and molecular features in a shared latent space using heterogeneous graphs that encode cell-feature, feature-feature and spatial adjacency relationships. An edge-based contrastive objective with missingness-aware negative sampling avoids false-negative supervision under unobserved modalities, while adversarial domain adaptation suppresses batch-associated variation at the embedding level. Spatial data are incorporated as structurally informative constraints during learning, enabling systematic enrichment of molecular representations across spatial locations. Across diverse mosaic single-cell benchmarks and spatial datasets, GAMMI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in biological conservation, batch correction and spatial reconstruction, including in low-overlap and fully unpaired regimes.

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Publication Details

Journal
Briefings in Bioinformatics
Published
2026-04-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbag218
Primary Topic
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
Type
article
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article

GAMMI: graph-guided contrastive and adversarial integration of single-cell and spatial multi-omics data

Yipei Yu, Zhiwei Rong, W.T. Liu, Meihua Long et al.
Briefings in Bioinformatics
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
article

GAMMI: graph-guided contrastive and adversarial integration of single-cell and spatial multi-omics data

Yipei Yu, Zhiwei Rong, W.T. Liu, Meihua Long, Jiali Song, Yan Hou, Kai Cao, Meimei Luo
article en

Abstract

Integrating single-cell and spatial multi-omics data is essential for resolving cellular identity, regulatory programs and tissue organization, yet remains challenging under realistic experimental designs. In practice, data are often incomplete, unpaired and partially overlapping across batches and platforms, resulting in mosaic settings where missingness, batch effects and limited correspondence are tightly coupled. Existing methods typically rely on shared cells, explicit anchors or post hoc mapping, and can become unstable as overlap diminishes or spatial structure is not explicitly modeled. Here we present GAMMI (Graph-guided Adversarial Mosaic Multi-omics Integration), a unified graph learning framework for mosaic integration of heterogeneous single-cell and spatial multi-omics data. Rather than performing direct cell or sample alignment, GAMMI learns biologically meaningful relational structure by jointly embedding cells and molecular features in a shared latent space using heterogeneous graphs that encode cell-feature, feature-feature and spatial adjacency relationships. An edge-based contrastive objective with missingness-aware negative sampling avoids false-negative supervision under unobserved modalities, while adversarial domain adaptation suppresses batch-associated variation at the embedding level. Spatial data are incorporated as structurally informative constraints during learning, enabling systematic enrichment of molecular representations across spatial locations. Across diverse mosaic single-cell benchmarks and spatial datasets, GAMMI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in biological conservation, batch correction and spatial reconstruction, including in low-overlap and fully unpaired regimes.

Briefings in BioinformaticsVol. 27(3)
King University (US), Peking University (CN), Peking University Cancer Hospital (CN), Tianjin Medical University (CN)
Life in Land
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
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