VIP-OT: Dissecting Single-Cell Biochemical State Dynamics under Perturbation via Vibrational Painting and Optimal Transport

Dissecting the heterogeneous response of individual cells towards genetic and chemical perturbations is central to understanding the dynamic functions of cells and multicellular systems. However, characterizing and modeling how individual cells transition between different states remains a major challenge. Vibrational imaging provides high-content, biochemically informative, label-free molecular fingerprints of single cells but it remains at its infancy for dynamic or predictive analysis of cell state transition. Here, we introduce Vibrational Painting-Optimal Transport (VIP-OT), an integrated experimental-computational framework that overcomes this fundamental limitation. VIP-OT couples multiplexed infrared (IR) and Raman imaging with optimal transport to computationally reconstruct single-cell perturbation trajectories from unpaired population snapshots. When applying to over 22,000 single-cell spectra profiles from human breast adenocarcinoma cells under 16 drug treatments, this framework can retrospectively trace drug response heterogeneity back to baseline metabolic states. We leverage the inferred cell pairings to develop a machine learning model that accurately predicts the full post-treatment metabolic state of individual cells from their pre-treatment spectra. Furthermore, by modeling transitions across dose gradients, we introduce the concept of Spectral Velocity to map dynamic response trajectories and resolve drug combination effects into distinct, path-dependent molecular routes. Together, VIP-OT opens a new direction for dissecting heterogeneous perturbation responses at single cell resolution and serves as a foundation for building virtual simulators of cells under perturbations through high-throughput, high-content, and low-cost vibrational imaging, as well as interpretable <i>in silico</i> modeling.