ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Visualization of the spontaneous emergence of a complex, dynamic, and autocatalytic system.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visualizing Dynamic Processes in Energy Materials by Interferometric Scattering Microscopy.ACS energy letters · 2026Review
- Leveraging Partial Coherence to Enhance Nanoparticle Detection Sensitivity and Throughput in Interferometric Scattering Microscopy.ACS photonics · 2025Article
- Autocatalytic assembly of a chimeric aminoacyl-RNA synthetase ribozyme.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Molecular fingerprinting of biological nanoparticles with a label-free optofluidic platform.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Molecular fingerprinting of biological nanoparticles with a label-free optofluidic platform.Research square · 2023Article
- From autocatalysis to survival of the fittest in self-reproducing lipid systems.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2023Review
- Self-reproducing catalytic micelles as nanoscopic protocell precursors.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2021Review
- Scattering-based Light Microscopy: From Metal Nanoparticles to Single Proteins.Chemical reviews · 2021Review
- Synthesis of lipid membranes for artificial cells.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2021Review
- Chemically fueled materials with a self-immolative mechanism: transient materials with a fast on/off response.Chemical science · 2021Article
- Acceleration of lipid reproduction by emergence of microscopic motion.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Coupled Metabolic Cycles Allow Out-of-Equilibrium Autopoietic Vesicle Replication.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2020Article
- Emergence and Rearrangement of Dynamic Supramolecular Aggregates Visualized by Interferometric Scattering Microscopy.ACS nano · 2020Article
- Article
- Controlling the Kinetics of Self-Reproducing Micelles by Catalyst Compartmentalization in a Biphasic System.The Journal of organic chemistry · 2019Article
- A chemically fuelled self-replicator.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Artificial intelligence exploration of unstable protocells leads to predictable properties and discovery of collective behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Autocatalytic chemical reactions are widely studied as models of biological processes and to better understand the origins of life on Earth. Minimal self-reproducing amphiphiles have been developed in this context and as an approach to de novo "bottom-up" synthetic protocells. How chemicals come together to produce living systems, however, remains poorly understood, despite much experimentation and speculation. Here, we use ultrasensitive label-free optical microscopy to visualize the spontaneous emergence of an autocatalytic system from an aqueous mixture of two chemicals. Quantitative, in situ nanoscale imaging reveals heterogeneous self-reproducing aggregates and enables the real-time visualization of the synthesis of new aggregates at the reactive interface. The aggregates and reactivity patterns observed vary together with differences in the respective environment. This work demonstrates how imaging of chemistry at the nanoscale can provide direct insight into the dynamic evolution of nonequilibrium systems across molecular to microscopic length scales.
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Registered trials
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