SPARC: A Graph-based Optimization Framework for Directional Trajectory Reconstruction Across Ordered Single-Cell Conditions
Single-cell transcriptomics has enabled systematic profiling of cellular states across ordered biological contexts, including developmental stages, treatment phases, disease progression, and anatomical compartments. A central challenge is to reconstruct trajectories that respect the directionality imposed by biology or experimental design. Existing trajectory inference methods reconstruct cell-state progressions from latent-space geometry but do not enforce external biological ordering during graph construction, yielding biologically inadmissible transitions. An emerging paradigm of optimal-transport (OT) approaches partially addresses this limitation by incorporating experimental ordering into probabilistic state-to-state correspondences, yet their pairwise formulation cannot resolve whether a given state is an intermediate state or a terminal state along a multi-step progression. In multi-timepoint settings, OT typically estimates couplings only betweenadjacent timepoints and then chains these locally solved couplings to approximate long-range trajectories without a global optimization across all conditions simultaneously. Here we present SPARC, a graph-based optimization framework that quantifies similarity in a shared high-dimensional latent space and reconstruct directional trajectories under biological constraints. Global shortest-path optimization over this graph yields progression routes, from which SPARC derives path-based pseudotime identifies bottlenecks clusters, and detects gene temporal behavior. SPARC was evaluated across three complementary settings representing distinct trajectory-inference challenges. Its application to paired primary and lung metastatic osteosarcoma samples allows us to be the first to propose a “cross-organ bone-like microenvironment” hypothesis, in which osteoclastogenic signaling establishes a bone-like remodeling niche within the pulmonary metastatic lesion that promotes osteoclast differentiation and activity. The findings are independently recoverable in human osteosarcoma Visium HD spatial transcriptomics.