ArticleNature communications2014
Evolution of oil droplets in a chemorobotic platform.
Article in Nature communications, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 123 citations in OpenAlex.
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Predator-Prey Behavior of Droplets Propelling Through Self-Generated Channels in Crystalline Surfactant Layers.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Wetware network-based AI: a chemical approach to embodied cognition for robotics and artificial intelligence.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2025Article
- Article
- Robotic Modules for the Programmable Chemputation of Molecules and Materials.ACS central science · 2023Review
- Evolution of Proliferative Model Protocells Highly Responsive to the Environment.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Marangoni spreading and contracting three-component droplets on completely wetting surfaces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Construction of Supramolecular Systems That Achieve Lifelike Functions.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- An Approach to the De Novo Synthesis of Life.Accounts of chemical research · 2022Article
- A short peptide synthon for liquid-liquid phase separation.Nature chemistry · 2021Article
- Automated exploration of DNA-based structure self-assembly networks.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Connecting primitive phase separation to biotechnology, synthetic biology, and engineering.Journal of biosciences · 2021Review
- Organic Composomes as Supramolecular Aptamers.ACS omega · 2020Article
- Autonomous mesoscale positioning emerging from myelin filament self-organization and Marangoni flows.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Optical monitoring of polymerizations in droplets with high temporal dynamic range.Chemical science · 2020Article
- A curious formulation robot enables the discovery of a novel protocell behavior.Science advances · 2020Article
- Probing complexity: thermodynamics and computational mechanics approaches to origins studies.Interface focus · 2019Article
- Thermodynamics of Duplication Thresholds in Synthetic Protocell Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- An evolutionary algorithm for the discovery of porous organic cages.Chemical science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolution, once the preserve of biology, has been widely emulated in software, while physically embodied systems that can evolve have been limited to electronic and robotic devices and have never been artificially implemented in populations of physically interacting chemical entities. Herein we present a liquid-handling robot built with the aim of investigating the properties of oil droplets as a function of composition via an automated evolutionary process. The robot makes the droplets by mixing four different compounds in different ratios and placing them in a Petri dish after which they are recorded using a camera and the behaviour of the droplets analysed using image recognition software to give a fitness value. In separate experiments, the fitness function discriminates based on movement, division and vibration over 21 cycles, giving successive fitness increases. Analysis and theoretical modelling of the data yields fitness landscapes analogous to the genotype-phenotype correlations found in biological evolution.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.