294-Systema: Evaluating Genetic Perturbation Prediction

Paper Talk · Dec 5, 2025 · 12m

The article introduces Systema, a new evaluation framework designed to improve the prediction of transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations in functional genomics. The authors argue that existing computational methods for predicting these responses are often misleadingly successful because they predominantly capture systematic variation-consistent transcriptional differences between perturbed and control cells-rather than perturbation-specific effects. To address this overestimation of performance, Systema shifts the point of reference from the control cell centroid to the perturbed…