Integrating Mechanistic Modeling and Machine Learning to Study CD4+/CD8+ CAR-T Cell Dynamics with Tumor Antigen Regulation

This paper presents an extended mechanistic model of CD4+/CD8+ CAR-T cell dynamics regulated by tumor antigen burden, demonstrating how combining sensitivity analysis with machine learning can elucidate treatment drivers and partially recover predictive accuracy from noisy patient data despite parameter uncertainty.

Saranya Varakunan, Melissa Stadt, Mohammad KohandelWed, 11 Ma🧬 q-bio

Theory of Cell Body Lensing and Phototaxis Sign Reversal in "Eyeless" Mutants of ChlamydomonasChlamydomonas

This paper presents a quantitative theory explaining how the spherical cell body of "eyeless" *Chlamydomonas* mutants acts as a lens to create internal caustics, causing a phototaxis sign reversal because the flagellar response is dominated by the rapidly varying lensed signal rather than the direct illumination.

Sumit Kumar Birwa, Ming Yang, Adriana I. Pesci, Raymond E. GoldsteinThu, 12 Ma🧬 q-bio

Discovery of a Hematopoietic Manifold in scGPT Yields a Method for Extracting Performant Algorithms from Biological Foundation Model Internals

This paper introduces a novel three-stage mechanistic interpretability method that extracts a compact, high-performing hematopoietic algorithm directly from the internal attention weights of the scGPT foundation model, achieving superior zero-shot classification and pseudotime ordering on independent datasets with significantly fewer parameters and training time than standard probing or retraining approaches.

Ihor KendiukhovThu, 12 Ma🧬 q-bio

Single-cell directional sensing at ultra-low chemoattractant concentrations from extreme first-passage events

This paper demonstrates that single cells can rapidly and accurately infer the direction of a chemoattractant source at ultra-low concentrations by leveraging the disproportionately high directional information contained in early, extreme first-passage receptor binding events rather than waiting for steady-state concentration profiles.

Vincent Fiorino, Sean D. Lawley, Alan E. LindsayThu, 12 Ma🧬 q-bio

Causal Circuit Tracing Reveals Distinct Computational Architectures in Single-Cell Foundation Models: Inhibitory Dominance, Biological Coherence, and Cross-Model Convergence

This study introduces causal circuit tracing to reveal that distinct single-cell foundation models (Geneformer and scGPT) share conserved computational architectures characterized by inhibitory dominance and biological coherence, with cross-model consensus identifying disease-associated domains that are validated by CRISPRi as reflecting co-expression rather than causal encoding.

Ihor Kendiukhov2026-03-05🤖 cs.LG

Learning Explicit Single-Cell Dynamics Using ODE Representations

The paper proposes Cell-Mechanistic Neural Networks (Cell-MNN), an end-to-end encoder-decoder architecture that utilizes locally linearized ODEs to efficiently model single-cell differentiation dynamics and explicitly learn interpretable, biologically consistent gene interactions, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods in scalability and interpretability.

Jan-Philipp von Bassewitz, Adeel Pervez, Marco Fumero + 3 more2026-03-05🤖 cs.LG