764-X-Cell: Scaling Causal Perturbation Prediction

Paper Talk · Apr 8, 2026 · 22m

The paper introduces X-Atlas/Pisces, the most extensive genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset created to date, featuring 25.6 million single-cell transcriptomes across 16 biological contexts. Leveraging this massive resource, researchers developed X-Cell, a diffusion language model designed to predict how genetic interventions reshape gene expression. The model improves accuracy by integrating multi-modal biological priors, such as protein language models and interaction networks, through a specialized cross-attention architecture. By scaling the system to 4.9 billion parameters in…