ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2015
Emergent chemical behavior in variable-volume protocells.
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Protocellular energy transduction, information and fitness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The protometabolic nature of prebiotic chemistry.Chemical Society reviews · 2023Review
- Coevolution of reproducers and replicators at the origin of life and the conditions for the origin of genomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The Construction of Biological 'Inter-Identity' as the Outcome of a Complex Process of Protocell Development in Prebiotic Evolution.Frontiers in physiology · 2020Article
- Article
- Adaptive artificial evolution of droplet protocells in a 3D-printed fluidic chemorobotic platform with configurable environments.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Chemical roots of biological evolution: the origins of life as a process of development of autonomous functional systems.Open biology · 2017Review
- Framing major prebiotic transitions as stages of protocell development: three challenges for origins-of-life research.Beilstein journal of organic chemistry · 2017Article
- Direct detection of SERCA calcium transport and small-molecule inhibition in giant unilamellar vesicles.Biochemical and biophysical research communications · 2016Article
- Generating minimal living systems from non-living materials and increasing their evolutionary abilities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Artificial protocellular compartments and lipid vesicles have been used as model systems to understand the origins and requirements for early cells, as well as to design encapsulated reactors for biotechnology. One prominent feature of vesicles is the semi-permeable nature of their membranes, able to support passive diffusion of individual solute species into/out of the compartment, in addition to an osmotic water flow in the opposite direction to the net solute concentration gradient. Crucially, this water flow affects the internal aqueous volume of the vesicle in response to osmotic imbalances, in particular those created by ongoing reactions within the system. In this theoretical study, we pay attention to this often overlooked aspect and show, via the use of a simple semi-spatial vesicle reactor model, that a changing solvent volume introduces interesting non-linearities into an encapsulated chemistry. Focusing on bistability, we demonstrate how a changing volume compartment can degenerate existing bistable reactions, but also promote emergent bistability from very simple reactions, which are not bistable in bulk conditions. One particularly remarkable effect is that two or more chemically-independent reactions, with mutually exclusive reaction kinetics, are able to couple their dynamics through the variation of solvent volume inside the vesicle. Our results suggest that other chemical innovations should be expected when more realistic and active properties of protocellular compartments are taken into account.
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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.