Large Language Models Meet Virtual Cell: A Survey

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07706v1
• Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2025 02:41:30 GMT
• Title: Large Language Models Meet Virtual Cell: A Survey
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming cellular biology by enabling the development of "virtual cells"<n>This work provides a comprehensive review of LLMs for virtual cell modeling.
• Score: 5.3507304878218145
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are transforming cellular biology by enabling the development of "virtual cells"--computational systems that represent, predict, and reason about cellular states and behaviors. This work provides a comprehensive review of LLMs for virtual cell modeling. We propose a unified taxonomy that organizes existing methods into two paradigms: LLMs as Oracles, for direct cellular modeling, and LLMs as Agents, for orchestrating complex scientific tasks. We identify three core tasks--cellular representation, perturbation prediction, and gene regulation inference--and review their associated models, datasets, evaluation benchmarks, as well as the critical challenges in scalability, generalizability, and interpretability.

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