ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Membraneless polyester microdroplets as primordial compartments at the origins of life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers.
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Who cites it
54 citing papers in PubMed, 136 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hydroxy acid conjugation to lipids increases structural and hydrolytic stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Decoding the tactics for coacervate pedestrian crossing the phospholipid membrane.Chemical science · 2026Review
- Surface Engineered Biomolecular Condensates for Targeted Cell Cytotoxicity.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Protopeptide backbone affects assembly in aqueous solutions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- How hard is it to encapsulate life? The general constraints on encapsulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Smart coacervate microdroplets: biomimetic design, material innovations, and emerging applications in biomacromolecule delivery.Bioactive materials · 2025Review
- High-Yield Prebiotic Polymerization of 2',3'-Cyclic Nucleotides under Wet-Dry Cycling.ACS central science · 2025Article
- Biomolecule-Based Coacervation: Mechanisms, Applications, and Future Perspectives in Biomedical and Biotechnological Fields.Biomolecules · 2025Review
- Evolution of complex chemical mixtures reveals combinatorial compression and population synchronicity.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Primitive homochiral polyester formation driven by tartaric acid and calcium availability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Biological Polymers: Evolution, Function, and Significance.Accounts of chemical research · 2025Article
- Probing the Limits of Reactant Concentration and Volume in Primitive Polyphenyllactate Synthesis and Microdroplet Assembly Processes.ACS bio & med chem Au · 2025Article
- Bubble-Inspired Multifunctional Magnetic Microrobots for Integrated Multidimensional Targeted Biosensing.Nano letters · 2024Article
- How biophysics shapes the origins of life: a 21st IUPAB/62nd BSJ joint congress symposium overview.Biophysical reviews · 2024Article
- The astrochemical evolutionary traits of phospholipid membrane homochirality.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2024Review
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Physiological and pathological effects of phase separation in the central nervous system.Journal of molecular medicine (Berlin, Germany) · 2024Review
- Microfluidics-Based Drying-Wetting Cycles to Investigate Phase Transitions of Small Molecules Solutions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Primitive membraneless compartments as a window into the earliest cells.Biophysical reviews · 2023Article
- Biomolecular condensates - extant relics or evolving microcompartments?Communications biology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 1 institution in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Compartmentalization was likely essential for primitive chemical systems during the emergence of life, both for preventing leakage of important components, i.e., genetic materials, and for enhancing chemical reactions. Although life as we know it uses lipid bilayer-based compartments, the diversity of prebiotic chemistry may have enabled primitive living systems to start from other types of boundary systems. Here, we demonstrate membraneless compartmentalization based on prebiotically available organic compounds, α-hydroxy acids (αHAs), which are generally coproduced along with α-amino acids in prebiotic settings. Facile polymerization of αHAs provides a model pathway for the assembly of combinatorially diverse primitive compartments on early Earth. We characterized membraneless microdroplets generated from homo- and heteropolyesters synthesized from drying solutions of αHAs endowed with various side chains. These compartments can preferentially and differentially segregate and compartmentalize fluorescent dyes and fluorescently tagged RNA, providing readily available compartments that could have facilitated chemical evolution by protecting, exchanging, and encapsulating primitive components. Protein function within and RNA function in the presence of certain droplets is also preserved, suggesting the potential relevance of such droplets to various origins of life models. As a lipid amphiphile can also assemble around certain droplets, this further shows the droplets' potential compatibility with and scaffolding ability for nascent biomolecular systems that could have coexisted in complex chemical systems. These model compartments could have been more accessible in a "messy" prebiotic environment, enabling the localization of a variety of protometabolic and replication processes that could be subjected to further chemical evolution before the advent of the Last Universal Common Ancestor.
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