STGBench: sequencing-level spatial DNA-RNA simulation for multimodal and virtual cell-oriented benchmarking of genomic alterations.

Abstract

Spatially resolved genomics and transcriptomics are reshaping our understanding of tumor evolution and therapeutic resistance, yet benchmarking spatial copy number variation (CNV), single-nucleotide variant (SNV), and spatial mutation-burden proxy analyses is constrained by the scarcity of datasets with known ground truth. Existing simulators often produce only count matrices, lack matched DNA-RNA outputs, or do not propagate genomic variation to sequencing-level signals, limiting end-to-end benchmarking of multi-omics pipelines, including virtual cell-oriented multimodal benchmarks. Here, we present STGBench, a sequencing-level spatial DNA-RNA simulator that generates paired DNA-seq alignments (BAM files) and matched gene expression matrices on a user-defined 2D tissue grid. STGBench builds tissue masks from geometric templates or image-derived masks, overlays spatial CNV landscapes and SNV/VAF fields in boundary, gradient, and nested modes, and synthesizes DNA and RNA readouts by coupling copy number states to expression under a negative binomial model with spatially correlated technical effects; outputs are directly consumable by downstream tools. Using AneuFinder on simulated DNA data, spatial CNV profiles are recovered with Pearson r up to 0.855. Applying InferCNV to simulated transcriptomes, CNV-driven expression signatures are reproduced (r up to 0.996) and support unsupervised structure consistent with clonal organization; DNA-derived and RNA-inferred CNVs show concordance (r ≈ 0.77). CellSNP recovers diverse spatial SNV patterns from simulated reads, and IGV inspection confirms realistic allelic balance and CNV-associated coverage shifts at nucleotide resolution. Collectively, STGBench provides a controllable benchmark generator for spatial CNV/SNV and mutation-burden analyses with explicit ground truth across paired DNA-RNA modalities. STGBench is open source at https://github.com/Icarus200110/STGBench.