With the development of spatially resolved transcriptomics technologies, it is now possible to explore the gene expression profiles of single cells while preserving their spatial context. Spatial clustering plays a key role in spatial transcriptome data analysis. In the past 2 years, several graph neural network-based methods have emerged, which significantly improved the accuracy of spatial clustering. However, accurately identifying the boundaries of spatial domains remains a challenging task. In this article, we propose stAA, an adversarial variational graph autoencoder, to identify spatial domain. stAA generates cell embedding by leveraging gene expression and spatial information using graph neural networks and enforces the distribution of cell embeddings to a prior distribution through Wasserstein distance. The adversarial training process can make cell embeddings better capture spatial domain information and more robust. Moreover, stAA incorporates global graph information into cell embeddings using labels generated by pre-clustering. Our experimental results show that stAA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves better clustering results across different profiling platforms and various resolutions. We also conducted numerous biological analyses and found that stAA can identify fine-grained structures in tissues, recognize different functional subtypes within tumors and accurately identify developmental trajectories.
Keywords:adversarial learning; graph autoencoder; graph neural network; spatial domain; spatial transcriptomics.

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乐备实（上海优宁维生物科技股份有限公司旗下全资子公司），是国内专注于提供高质量蛋白检测以及组学分析服务的实验服务专家，自2018年成立以来，乐备实不断寻求突破，公司的服务技术平台已扩展到单细胞测序、空间多组学、流式检测、超敏电化学发光、Luminex多因子检测、抗体芯片、PCR Array、ELISA、Elispot、PLA蛋白互作、多色免疫组化、DSP空间多组学等30多个，建立起了一套涵盖基因、蛋白、细胞以及组织水平实验的完整检测体系。

 
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