celllevel

Celllevel is a term used to describe analyses, data, or models that operate at the resolution of individual cells or discrete cellular units. It emphasizes granularity beyond bulk measurements and is used across biology, bioinformatics, and computational modeling.

In biology and genomics, cell-level data come from single-cell technologies such as single-cell RNA sequencing and single-cell ATAC-seq. Cell-level analysis includes identifying cell types and states, reconstructing developmental trajectories, measuring gene expression variability among cells, and inferring cell-specific regulatory networks. This contrasts with bulk analyses, which average signals across many cells.

In computational modeling, including cellular automata and agent-based simulations, celllevel refers to modeling decisions at the scale of single cells or grid cells, with each cell carrying rules or state and interacting with neighbors, producing emergent phenomena.

Applications include developmental biology, cancer ecology and intratumoral heterogeneity, immunology, and tissue engineering. Challenges include technical noise and dropout in single-cell data, data integration across modalities, batch effects, and computational demands for large cell counts.

The term is not universally standardized and may be used differently across disciplines. When used, it is often a shorthand for "cell-level resolution" or "at the level of individual cells" to avoid ambiguity with bulk or tissue-level analyses.