Albert Cardona"Cellular morphology emerges from polygenic, distributed transcriptional variation", Paylakhi et al. 2026
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.12.711281v1
Cellular morphology emerges from polygenic, distributed transcriptional variation
Height and most disease risk are known polygenic traits: characteristics governed by multiple genes at different loci instead of a select few. Though we are beginning to understand how genetic variation impacts cell morphology, whether such an analogous polygenic architecture operates at the cellular level, where morphology integrates cytoskeletal organization, organelle positioning, and metabolic state, has yet to be systematically tested. Here, we demonstrate that cellular morphology behaves as a polygenic trait by integrating multimodal modeling, perturbation profiling, and population scale genetic variation. A shared latent-space autoencoder trained on four large perturbation datasets predicts morphology from gene expression and generalizes without retraining to matched RNA-seq and Cell Painting profiles from 100 genetically diverse iPSC donors. The model predicted 17 morphological features (R > 0.6, permutation FDR q < 0.05), enriched for spatial organelle distribution and cytoskeletal architecture. Predictive performance does not arise from dominant gene-phenotype relationships: individual genes contribute modestly, and marginal gene-morphology correlations are uniformly weak, revealing a distributed regulatory architecture. Despite this polygenicity, CRISPR perturbation data from the JUMP consortium validates specific model-prioritized genes, such as the cytoskeletal regulator TIAM1, membrane trafficking factor RAB31, and mitochondrial-associated membrane transporter ABCC5, as molecular anchors whose disruption produces feature-specific morphological shifts. Transcriptome-wide association analyses identify correlational variant-gene-morphology chains linking cis-regulatory variation through mitochondrial metabolism (PDHX) and iron transport (SLC11A2) to cellular architecture. These results establish cellular morphology as a polygenic systems phenotype, extending the omnigenic framework to the cellular level and providing a biological basis for interpreting cross-modal prediction in functional genomics. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. AnalytiXIN Fellowship in Life Sciences
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