2026/07/01 by A Salati, Louis-Alexandre Leger, Maxine Leonardi +2 · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Cell Image Analysis Techniques #Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
paper · doi:10.59275/j.melba.2026-84ea
openalex publication_date 2026/07/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/12
The cell division cycle is a ubiquitous essential process across the tree of life. Understanding cell cycle dynamics is crucial for studying biological processes such as growth, development and disease progression. While fluorescent protein reporters like the Fucci system allow live monitoring of cell cycle phases, they require genetic engineering and occupy additional fluorescence channels, limiting broader applicability in complex experiments. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning methods for predicting continuous Fucci signals using non-fluorescence brightfield imaging, a widely available label-free imaging modality. To that end, we generated a large dataset of 1.3 M images of dividing human RPE1 cells with full cell cycle trajectories to quantitatively compare the predictive performance of distinct model categories including single time-frame models, causal state space models and bidirectional transformer models. We show that both causal and transformer-based models significantly outperform single- and fixed frame approaches, enabling the prediction of visually imperceptible transitions like G1/S within 1 hour resolution. Our findings underscore the importance of sequence models for accurate predictions of cell cycle dynamics and highlight their potential for label-free imaging.