Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-05-15DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101294
Andrew Ramirez, Brian T Orcutt-Jahns, Sean Pascoe, Armaan Abraham, Breanna Remigio, Nathaniel Thomas, Aaron S Meyer
{"title":"Integrative, high-resolution analysis of single-cell gene expression across experimental conditions with PARAFAC2-RISE.","authors":"Andrew Ramirez, Brian T Orcutt-Jahns, Sean Pascoe, Armaan Abraham, Breanna Remigio, Nathaniel Thomas, Aaron S Meyer","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101294","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101294","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Effective exploration and analysis tools are vital for the extraction of insights from single-cell data. However, current techniques for modeling single-cell studies performed across experimental conditions (e.g., samples) require restrictive assumptions or do not adequately deconvolute condition-to-condition variation from cell-to-cell variation. Here, we report that reduction and insight in single-cell exploration (RISE), an adaptation of the tensor decomposition method PARAFAC2, enables the dimensionality reduction and analysis of single-cell data across conditions. We demonstrate the benefits of RISE across distinct examples of single-cell RNA-sequencing experiments of peripheral immune cells: pharmacologic drug perturbations and systemic lupus erythematosus patient samples. RISE enables associations of gene variation patterns with patients or perturbations while connecting each coordinated change to single cells without requiring cell-type annotations. The theoretical grounding of RISE suggests a unified framework for many single-cell data modeling tasks while providing an intuitive dimensionality reduction approach for multi-sample single-cell studies across biological contexts. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12181050/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144087033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-04-28DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101268
Fang Ba, Yufei Zhang, Luyao Wang, Xiangyang Ji, Wan-Qiu Liu, Shengjie Ling, Jian Li
{"title":"Integrase enables synthetic intercellular logic via bacterial conjugation.","authors":"Fang Ba, Yufei Zhang, Luyao Wang, Xiangyang Ji, Wan-Qiu Liu, Shengjie Ling, Jian Li","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101268","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101268","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Integrases have been widely used in synthetic biology for genome engineering and genetic circuit design. They mediate DNA recombination to alter the genotypes of single cell lines in vivo, with these changes being permanently recorded and inherited via vertical gene transfer. However, integrase-based intercellular DNA messaging and its regulation via horizontal gene transfer remain underexplored. Here, we introduce a versatile strategy to design, build, and test integrase-based intercellular DNA messaging through bacterial conjugation. First, we screened conjugative plasmids and recipient cells for efficient conjugation. Then, we established a layered framework to describe the interactions among hierarchical E. coli strains and implemented dual-layer Boolean logic gates to demonstrate intercellular DNA messaging and management. Finally, we expanded the design to include four-layer single-processing pathways and dual-layer multi-processing systems. This strategy advances intercellular DNA messaging, hierarchical signal processing, and the application of integrase in systems and synthetic biology.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144000528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101298
Mohammad Mazharul Islam, William Shao, Mariska Batavia, Roseanne M Ford, Bernhard O Palsson, Jens Nielsen, Costas D Maranas, Sang Yup Lee, Jason A Papin
{"title":"Reframing the role of the objective function in its proper context for metabolic network modeling.","authors":"Mohammad Mazharul Islam, William Shao, Mariska Batavia, Roseanne M Ford, Bernhard O Palsson, Jens Nielsen, Costas D Maranas, Sang Yup Lee, Jason A Papin","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101298","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101298","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The \"objective function\" is a core concept in metabolic network modeling. Its use has enabled the analysis of large data to drive deeper understanding of cellular metabolism. This commentary reframes how the objective function is discussed to enhance its value and clarify misunderstandings in metabolic network modeling.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":"16 6","pages":"101298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144337343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-05-08DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101291
Yiheng Mao, Yuan Li, Zhendong Zheng, Yanfen Xu, Mi Ke, An He, Fuchao Liang, Keren Zhang, Xi Wang, Weina Gao, Ruijun Tian
{"title":"All-at-once spatial proteome profiling of complex tissue context with single-cell-type resolution by proximity proteomics.","authors":"Yiheng Mao, Yuan Li, Zhendong Zheng, Yanfen Xu, Mi Ke, An He, Fuchao Liang, Keren Zhang, Xi Wang, Weina Gao, Ruijun Tian","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101291","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101291","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Spatial proteomics enables in-depth mapping of tissue architectures, mostly achieved by laser microdissection-mass spectrometry (LMD-MS) and antibody-based imaging. However, trade-offs among sampling precision, throughput, and proteome coverage still limit the applicability of these strategies. Here, we propose proximity labeling for spatial proteomics (PSPro) by combining precise antibody-targeted biotinylation and efficient affinity purification for all-at-once cell-type proteome capture with sub-micrometer resolution from single tissue slice. With fine-tuned labeling parameters, PSPro shows reliable performance in benchmarking against flow cytometry- and LMD-based proteomic workflows. We apply PSPro to tumor and spleen slices, enriching thousands of proteins containing known markers from ten cell types. We further incorporate LMD into PSPro to facilitate comparison of cell subpopulations from the same tissue slice, revealing spatial proteome heterogeneity of cancer cells and immune cells in pancreatic tumor. Collectively, PSPro converts the traditional \"antibody-epitope\" paradigm to an \"antibody-cell-type proteome\" for spatial biology in a user-friendly manner. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144047235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-05-12DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101293
Daniel Paysan, Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, Xinyi Zhang, G V Shivashankar, Caroline Uhler
{"title":"Image2Reg: Linking chromatin images to gene regulation using genetic and chemical perturbation screens.","authors":"Daniel Paysan, Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan, Xinyi Zhang, G V Shivashankar, Caroline Uhler","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101293","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101293","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Representation learning provides an opportunity to uncover the link between 3D genome organization and gene regulatory networks, thereby connecting the physical and the biochemical space of a cell. Our method, Image2Reg, uses chromatin images obtained in large-scale genetic and chemical perturbation screens. Through convolutional neural networks, Image2Reg generates gene embedding that represents the effect of gene perturbation on chromatin organization. In addition, combining protein-protein interaction data with cell-type-specific transcriptomic data through a graph convolutional network, we obtain a gene embedding that represents the regulatory effect of genes. Finally, Image2Reg learns a map between the resulting physical and biochemical representation of cells, allowing us to predict the perturbed gene modules based on chromatin images. Our results confirm the deep link between chromatin organization and gene regulation and demonstrate that it can be harnessed to identify drug targets and genes upstream of perturbed phenotypes from a simple and inexpensive chromatin staining.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101293"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12181048/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144055145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-04-28DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101269
Kasey S Love, Christopher P Johnstone, Emma L Peterman, Stephanie Gaglione, Michael E Birnbaum, Kate E Galloway
{"title":"Model-guided design of microRNA-based gene circuits supports precise dosage of transgenic cargoes into diverse primary cells.","authors":"Kasey S Love, Christopher P Johnstone, Emma L Peterman, Stephanie Gaglione, Michael E Birnbaum, Kate E Galloway","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101269","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101269","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In a therapeutic context, supraphysiological expression of transgenes can compromise engineered phenotypes and lead to toxicity. To ensure a narrow range of transgene expression, we developed a single-transcript, microRNA-based incoherent feedforward loop called compact microRNA-mediated attenuator of noise and dosage (ComMAND). We experimentally tuned the ComMAND output profile, and we modeled the system to explore additional tuning strategies. By comparing ComMAND to two-gene implementations, we demonstrate the precise control afforded by the single-transcript architecture, particularly at low copy numbers. We show that ComMAND tightly regulates transgene expression from lentiviruses and precisely controls expression in primary human T cells, primary rat neurons, primary mouse embryonic fibroblasts, and human induced pluripotent stem cells. Finally, ComMAND effectively sets levels of the clinically relevant transgenes frataxin (FXN) and fragile X messenger ribonucleoprotein 1 (Fmr1) within a narrow window. Overall, ComMAND is a compact tool well suited to precisely specify the expression of therapeutic cargoes. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12181051/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144063516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-05-29DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101296
Pierre Bost, Ruben Casanova, Uria Mor, Martina Haberecker, Chantal Pauli, Susanne Dettwiler, Bernd Bodenmiller
{"title":"Statistical modeling and analysis of cell counts from multiplexed imaging data.","authors":"Pierre Bost, Ruben Casanova, Uria Mor, Martina Haberecker, Chantal Pauli, Susanne Dettwiler, Bernd Bodenmiller","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101296","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101296","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The rapid development of multiplexed imaging technologies has enabled the spatial cartography of various healthy and tumor tissues. However, adequate statistical models are still lacking to compare tissue compositions across sample groups. Here, we developed two statistical models that accurately describe the distributions of cell counts in an imaging mass cytometry dataset comprising tissues from a lymph node, COVID-19-affected lung samples, and Hashimoto disease. The parameters of these distributions are directly linked to the field of view size and to cellular properties, including density and spatial aggregation. We identified statistical tests that improved statistical power for differential abundance testing compared with the commonly used rank-based test. Our analysis revealed spatial aggregation as the main determinant of statistical power and that high numbers of fields of view are required when cells are highly aggregated. To overcome this challenge, we propose a stratified sampling strategy that considerably reduces the required sample size.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144188703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101322
Karoline Faust, Ju-Sheng Zheng, Ana Djukovic, Joao Xavier, Yang Bai, Katie Pollard, Amy Willis, Rebecca Vega Thurber, Thomas Sharpton
{"title":"What limits our ability to study the effects of microbial diversity on health and the environment?","authors":"Karoline Faust, Ju-Sheng Zheng, Ana Djukovic, Joao Xavier, Yang Bai, Katie Pollard, Amy Willis, Rebecca Vega Thurber, Thomas Sharpton","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101322","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101322","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":"16 6","pages":"101322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144337344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-06-18Epub Date: 2025-04-29DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101270
Jun Wu, Xiangzhe Kong, Ningguan Sun, Jing Wei, Sisi Shan, Fuli Feng, Feng Wu, Jian Peng, Linqi Zhang, Yang Liu, Jianzhu Ma
{"title":"FlowDesign: Improved design of antibody CDRs through flow matching and better prior distributions.","authors":"Jun Wu, Xiangzhe Kong, Ningguan Sun, Jing Wei, Sisi Shan, Fuli Feng, Feng Wu, Jian Peng, Linqi Zhang, Yang Liu, Jianzhu Ma","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101270","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101270","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Designing antibodies with desired binding specificity and affinity is essential for pharmaceutical research. While diffusion-based models have advanced the co-design of the complementarity-determining region (CDR) sequences and structures, challenges remain, including non-informative priors, incompatibility with discrete amino acid types, and impractical computational costs in large-scale sampling. To address these, we propose FlowDesign, a sequence-structure co-design approach via flow matching, offering (1) flexible prior selection, (2) direct matching of discrete distributions, and (3) enhanced efficiency for large-scale sampling. By leveraging various priors, data-driven structural models proved the most informative. FlowDesign outperformed baselines in amino acid recovery (AAR), root-mean-square deviation (RMSD), and Rosetta energy. We also applied FlowDesign to design antibodies targeting the HIV-1 receptor CD4. FlowDesign yielded antibodies with improved binding affinity and neutralizing potency compared with the antibody ibalizumab across multiple HIV mutants, validated by biolayer interferometry (BLI) and pseudovirus neutralization. This highlights FlowDesign's potential in antibody and protein design. A record of this paper's transparent peer review process is included in the supplemental information.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101270"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144060427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cell systemsPub Date : 2025-05-21Epub Date: 2025-04-22DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2025.101264
Stephan Preibisch, Michael Innerberger, Daniel León-Periñán, Nikos Karaiskos, Nikolaus Rajewsky
{"title":"Scalable image-based visualization and alignment of spatial transcriptomics datasets.","authors":"Stephan Preibisch, Michael Innerberger, Daniel León-Periñán, Nikos Karaiskos, Nikolaus Rajewsky","doi":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101264","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cels.2025.101264","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We present the \"spatial transcriptomics imaging framework\" (STIM), an imaging-based computational framework focused on visualizing and aligning high-throughput spatial sequencing datasets. STIM is built on the powerful, scalable ImgLib2 and BigDataViewer (BDV) image data frameworks and thus enables novel development or transfer of existing computer vision techniques to the sequencing domain characterized by datasets with irregular measurement-spacing and arbitrary spatial resolution, such as spatial transcriptomics data generated by multiplexed targeted hybridization or spatial sequencing technologies. We illustrate STIM's capabilities by representing, interactively visualizing, 3D rendering, automatically registering, and segmenting publicly available spatial sequencing data from 13 serial sections of mouse brain tissue and from 19 sections of a human metastatic lymph node. We demonstrate that the simplest alignment mode of STIM achieves human-level accuracy.</p>","PeriodicalId":93929,"journal":{"name":"Cell systems","volume":" ","pages":"101264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144055553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}