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arXiv · 2607.24093

TCellAlign: Cross-study T-cell Populations Alignment with Nomenclature-Guided Multi-Agent Workflow

Pengyu Xie·Rongjia Zhou·Zhilin Ou·Junyuan Zhang·Xiang Zhou·Xiaobo Sun·Jiaying Lu·Wenjing Ma
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Abstract

Cell type standardization plays a central role in integrating biological knowledge across single-cell studies. While standardized resources (e.g., Cell Ontology, Nomenclature Frameworks) provide unified vocabularies of cell populations, scientific publications and public datasets continue to use heterogeneous study-specific labels, making cross-study comparison difficult even when biologically equivalent cell populations are described. In this work, we are the first to formulate this challenge as an evidence-grounded cell population alignment problem and propose TCellAlign, a multi-agent framework that includes literature retrieval, information extraction, nomenclature-guided label alignment, and evidence-based adjudication. This modular design preserves the original terminology and supporting evidence reported by each study while producing standardized labels that can be compared across studies. We further construct a manually validated benchmark dataset linking study-specific labels, CZ CELLxGENE annotations, and standardized T-cell nomenclature across 44 manually curated, published studies (including over seven million cells) spanning four biological categories: healthy, cancer, infectious disease and inflammatory diseases. Across the evaluated tasks, TCellAlign achieves stronger semantic agreement than ontology-based baselines and maintains transcriptomic coherence with both open-source and closed-source large language models (LLM) backbones. By connecting literature, datasets, and expert's nomenclature, TCellAlign enables consistent interpretation of T-cell subtypes and states across studies, facilitating biological knowledge integration and the development of future foundation models built upon standardized cellular representations.

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BibTeXRIS

Pengyu Xie, Rongjia Zhou, Zhilin Ou, Junyuan Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Xiaobo Sun, Jiaying Lu, Wenjing Ma. 2026-08-05. TCellAlign: Cross-study T-cell Populations Alignment with Nomenclature-Guided Multi-Agent Workflow. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24093

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