Explicit Mechanistic Operators in Predictive Virtual Cells: Evidence, Failure Modes, and a Minimum Falsification Framework for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction.
The term virtual cell now covers objects ranging from curated biochemical simulators to atlas-trained neural representations, yet the decisive empirical question is narrower: whether a model built to obey known biochemical rules predicts the effects of new drugs or genetic changes better than an otherwise identical mod...