scBaseCount is presently the largest public single-cell RNA-seq repository, containing over 502 million cells across 27 organisms and 75 tissues. An AI agent autonomously discovers, annotates, and uniformly reprocesses all 10× Genomics datasets in the SRA, creating a harmonized, continually updated resource for studying the diversity of cell biology and training AI models.

Modeling perturbation effects across large single-cell populations requires flexibility to capture heterogeneity. By training over sets of cells in a shared embedding space, State outperforms baselines at generalizing effects to new contexts. Cell-Eval, the framework used for this comparison, provides a comprehensive benchmark for future models.

Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 20 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03064-wThis Review discusses the promises and pitfalls of biological AI algorithms and presents a vision for generalist biological artificial intelligence, in which models can perform diverse tasks across biological domains.