ArticleeLife2020
Stochastic yield catastrophes and robustness in self-assembly.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 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
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Delay-facilitated self-assembly in compartmentalized systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Coarse-Graining Self-Assembly by the Stochastic Landscape Method.Journal of chemical theory and computation · 2025Article
- Economical and Versatile Subunit Design Principles for Self-Assembled DNA Origami Structures.ACS nano · 2025Article
- Economical routes to size-specific assembly of self-closing structures.Science advances · 2024Article
- Computational analysis of protein synthesis, diffusion, and binding in compartmental biochips.Microbial cell factories · 2023Article
- The Origin of Life: What Is the Question?Astrobiology · 2022Article
- The time complexity of self-assembly.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Thresholds in Origin of Life Scenarios.iScience · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A guiding principle in self-assembly is that, for high production yield, nucleation of structures must be significantly slower than their growth. However, details of the mechanism that impedes nucleation are broadly considered irrelevant. Here, we analyze self-assembly into finite-sized target structures employing mathematical modeling. We investigate two key scenarios to delay nucleation: (i) by introducing a slow activation step for the assembling constituents and, (ii) by decreasing the dimerization rate. These scenarios have widely different characteristics. While the dimerization scenario exhibits robust behavior, the activation scenario is highly sensitive to demographic fluctuations. These demographic fluctuations ultimately disfavor growth compared to nucleation and can suppress yield completely. The occurrence of this stochastic yield catastrophe does not depend on model details but is generic as soon as number fluctuations between constituents are taken into account. On a broader perspective, our results reveal that stochasticity is an important limiting factor for self-assembly and that the specific implementation of the nucleation process plays a significant role in determining the yield.
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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.