Mirana Ramialison
Postdoctoral Fellow
Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow
Professor Mirana Ramialison is Group Leader of the Bioinformatics and Transcriptomics Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, and co-Director of the reNEW Bioinformatics Hub of the Novo Nordisk Foundation for Stem Cell Medicine. Prof Ramialison received her Engineering degree from the University of Luminy in France, after which she worked as a programmer at the ERATO differentiation project in Kyoto. She obtained her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 2007, and joined the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney as an EMBO and HFSP Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2010. As an NHMRC/Heart Foundation Career Development Fellow, she established her first laboratory at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (Monash University) in 2014. She is currently a Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow, winner of the 2023 Shirley E Freeman Innovation Award. Prof Ramialison’s research focuses on developing and applying advanced bioinformatic and spatial transcriptomics methods to decode gene regulatory networks governing embryonic development, disease, and regeneration, with a particular emphasis on the mammalian heart.
End-to-end 3D multi-slice spatial transcriptomics analysis with VR-Omics/CELLestial
April 21, 2026
Virtual
We present VR-Omics (Genome Biology 2025), an open-source platform providing automated integration, analysis and interactive 3D visualisation of multi-slice spatial transcriptomics data through an accessible graphical interface and immersive analytics exploration option. VR-Omics outperforms other 3D ST analysis software by enabling co-planar slice concatenation, 3D reconstruction and interactive region-of-interest selection across platforms which are capabilities fragmented across existing tools or requiring custom scripting.
We applied VR-Omics to understand for the first time the molecular origin of rare paediatric cardiac rhabdomyomas, the most common primary paediatric cardiac tumours with limited treatment options beyond surgery. Their large size required sectioning across multiple Visium slides, introducing artificial fragmentation that conventional single-section analyses cannot resolve. Multi-slice co-planar integration revealed conserved dysregulation of oxidative phosphorylation and aerobic respiration at tumour centres across three patients, consistent with increased ATP production. Those spatial patterns were invisible when analysing individual sections separately, demonstrating how tissue fragmentation obscures biologically meaningful signatures. Findings were validated orthogonally using independent computational workflows.
Building on this foundation, we are now developing CELLestial (unpublished) a web-based, cloud-hosted tool that scales VR-Omics into expanded end-to-end workflow platform with enhanced 3D support and the ability to compare across biological conditions or time series data.