scGPA: an LLM-assisted workflow for directional virtual gene perturbation analysis from single-cell transcriptomes

Abstract

Existing virtual perturbation methods can often infer directional changes by comparing predicted post-perturbation expression profiles with control cells. However, workflows that directly return direction-specific downstream candidate genes together with confidence scores, evidence support and interpretable summaries remain limited. We developed scGPA, an LLM-assisted workflow system for directional single-cell virtual gene perturbation analysis. scGPA starts from raw single-cell RNA sequencing data and performs quality control, normalization, dimensionality reduction, clustering and cell-group selection. It then constructs cell-group-specific wild-type regulatory networks using repeated subsampling, principal component regression (PCR)/Ridge-based network inference and CP tensor denoising. Based on these networks, scGPA simulates dose-aware virtual knockdown of the target gene and applies signed perturbation propagation to estimate the magnitude and direction of downstream transcriptional responses. LLM assistance is used for marker-based cell-type annotation, evidence-guided candidate prioritization and user-facing biological summarization. We benchmarked scGPA across five public Perturb-seq datasets and compared its performance with GEARS, scGPT and a random baseline. The overall correct prediction rate of scGPA was 23.0%, exceeding those of GEARS (20.7%), scGPT (15.1%) and the random baseline (13.6%). These results indicate that scGPA achieved a higher correct prediction rate than the two comparator models and the random baseline. We subsequently evaluated scGPA using a public osteosarcoma single-cell dataset and performed qRT-PCR validation in 143B osteosarcoma cells. Among genes with significant experimental changes, scGPA achieved a directional concordance of 76.9%. When all tested downstream genes were counted, 37.0% were directionally correct, 51.9% showed no significant change and 11.1% changed in the opposite direction. scGPA provides a practical workflow system for predicting and prioritizing direction-specific downstream transcriptional responses after target-gene perturbation. By integrating single-cell regulatory network inference, signed virtual perturbation and LLM-assisted interpretation, scGPA supports target-gene function inference and downstream mechanistic investigation from single-cell transcriptomic data.