Individual cells undergo sudden birth and death events that look like jagged stutters.
Biological models traditionally treat a growing group of cells like a flowing fluid moving through time. This new simulation framework proves that life actually moves in discrete, jump-like bursts of activity. Individual cells make split-second decisions to divide or die that standard models usually smooth over as statistical noise. By capturing these microscopic skips, the system can reconstruct the chaotic history of a cell population from a single static snapshot. This shift allows doctors to see the jagged reality of how a tumor grows or how a tissue heals at the resolution of a single life.
Beyond Continuity: Simulation-free Reconstruction of Discrete Branching Dynamics from Single-cell Snapshots
arXiv · 2605.00545
Inferring cellular trajectories from destructive snapshots is complicated by the challenges of stochasticity and non-conservative mass dynamics such as cell proliferation and apoptosis. Existing unbalanced Optimal Transport (OT) methods treat mass as a continuous fluid, performing inference at the population level. However, this macroscopic view often fails to capture the discrete, jump-like nature of birth-death events at single-cell resolution, which is essential for understanding lineage bran