How do single cells communicate in a tissue? How can these interactions be modeled, while retaining information of spatial context? Researchers around Fabian Theis from Helmholtz Munich Computational Health Center and Technical University of Munich (TUM) have generated a new method to represent cell communication: the node-centric expression models (NCEM). These models are based on graph neural networks and helps to uncover the effects of cell tissue niche composition on gene expression without loss of spatial information.