Jeremy L. Jenkins

Andac Demir, Erik W. Anderson, Jeremy L. Jenkins et al.

In this work, we introduce CellxPert, a scalable multimodal foundation model that unifies single-cell and spatial multi-omics within a common representation space. CellxPert jointly encodes transcriptomic (scRNA-seq), chromatin-accessibility (ATAC-seq), and surface-proteomic (CITE-seq) measurements, while directly incorporating MERFISH and imaging mass-cytometry data as 2D or 3D spatial-visual layers. CellxPert facilitates four key downstream tasks out of the box: (i) cell-type annotation across a broad ontology of 154 largely overlapping identities -- the largest label space addressed to date and a stringent test of fine-grained discrimination, (ii) efficient fine-tuning using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), (iii) genome-wide transcriptomic response prediction to in-silico perturbations (ISP), and (iv) seamless multi-omic integration across various assays and platforms. Unlike current single-cell foundation models, which approximate gene perturbations by deleting or reordering tokenized gene expression ranks, CellxPert employs a Metropolis-Hastings sampler whose proposal kernel uses the model's masked conditional distributions to transition to new transcriptomic states conditioned on the perturbed genes. This Markov-chain procedure mitigates out-of-distribution artifacts introduced by abrupt token manipulation and produces trajectories that are biologically interpretable. Evaluations on PBMC68K, Replogle Perturb-seq, Systema, and BMMC benchmarks show that CellxPert surpasses classical and state-of-the-art baselines in cell-type annotation, perturbation response prediction, and multi-omic integration.

Andac Demir, Elizaveta Solovyeva, James Boylan et al.

Influenced by breakthroughs in LLMs, single-cell foundation models are emerging. While these models show successful performance in cell type clustering, phenotype classification, and gene perturbation response prediction, it remains to be seen if a simpler model could achieve comparable or better results, especially with limited data. This is important, as the quantity and quality of single-cell data typically fall short of the standards in textual data used for training LLMs. Single-cell sequencing often suffers from technical artifacts, dropout events, and batch effects. These challenges are compounded in a weakly supervised setting, where the labels of cell states can be noisy, further complicating the analysis. To tackle these challenges, we present sc-OTGM, streamlined with less than 500K parameters, making it approximately 100x more compact than the foundation models, offering an efficient alternative. sc-OTGM is an unsupervised model grounded in the inductive bias that the scRNAseq data can be generated from a combination of the finite multivariate Gaussian distributions. The core function of sc-OTGM is to create a probabilistic latent space utilizing a GMM as its prior distribution and distinguish between distinct cell populations by learning their respective marginal PDFs. It uses a Hit-and-Run Markov chain sampler to determine the OT plan across these PDFs within the GMM framework. We evaluated our model against a CRISPR-mediated perturbation dataset, called CROP-seq, consisting of 57 one-gene perturbations. Our results demonstrate that sc-OTGM is effective in cell state classification, aids in the analysis of differential gene expression, and ranks genes for target identification through a recommender system. It also predicts the effects of single-gene perturbations on downstream gene regulation and generates synthetic scRNA-seq data conditioned on specific cell states.