The Virtual Cell is a concept at the intersection of computational biology and systems science. At its core, it aims to represent a predictive model of how a living cell responds to internal and external cues. In its ideal form, a Virtual Cell captures every molecular detail - dynamic proteins, metabolic fluxes, physical interactions, and more. Building such a fully mechanistic model remains beyond current computational capabilities. A more tractable approximation has emerged over the past deca

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is revolutionizing our understanding of cellular biology, but the computational challenges of processing these massive datasets continue to evolve. As datasets grow from thousands to millions of cells, the choice of data format and processing pipeline becomes critical.  Parquet files, with their columnar storage and excellent compression ratios, seem like a natural fit for intermediate data storage in machine learning workflows. In a previous blog post, we

Single-cell transcriptomics (scRNA) studies now profile millions of cells, revealing identity, state, and tissue heterogeneity, and create unprecedented opportunities to extract biological insights that would be invisible in smaller studies. Tahoe-100M, a groundbreaking resource hosted by Arc Institute, contains 100 million cells covering 379 distinct drugs and 50 cancer cell lines, is one such study. On the other hand, at Tahoe-100M scale, even routine queries pose significant computational ch