ArticleNature communications2021
A robotic prebiotic chemist probes long term reactions of complexifying mixtures.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stringent selection on kinetics of condensation reactions: early steps in chemical evolution.Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP · 2026Article
- Messy Chemistry and the Emergence of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Transforming microfluidics for single-cell analysis with robotics and artificial intelligence.Lab on a chip · 2025Review
- Who Decides What Is Prebiotically Plausible? The Risks of Premature Constraints in Origin-of-Life Research.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Origin of life: β-sheet amyloid conformers as the primordial functional polymers on the early Earth and their role in the emergence of complex dynamic networks.FEBS letters · 2025Review
- Autocatalytic Reaction between HCN and Cysteamine Produces Hydrophobic, Catalytic, Liquid Compartments.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Evolution of complex chemical mixtures reveals combinatorial compression and population synchronicity.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Spatial structure supports diversity in prebiotic autocatalytic chemical ecosystems.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Article
- "Sea Water" Supplemented with Calcium Phosphate and Magnesium Sulfate in a Long-Term Miller-Type Experiment Yields Sugars, Nucleic Acids Bases, Nucleosides, Lipids, Amino Acids, and Oligopeptides.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Novel Apparatuses for Incorporating Natural Selection Processes into Origins-of-Life Experiments to Produce Adaptively Evolving Chemical Ecosystems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To experimentally test hypotheses about the emergence of living systems from abiotic chemistry, researchers need to be able to run intelligent, automated, and long-term experiments to explore chemical space. Here we report a robotic prebiotic chemist equipped with an automatic sensor system designed for long-term chemical experiments exploring unconstrained multicomponent reactions, which can run autonomously over long periods. The system collects mass spectrometry data from over 10 experiments, with 60 to 150 algorithmically controlled cycles per experiment, running continuously for over 4 weeks. We show that the robot can discover the production of high complexity molecules from simple precursors, as well as deal with the vast amount of data produced by a recursive and unconstrained experiment. This approach represents what we believe to be a necessary step towards the design of new types of Origin of Life experiments that allow testable hypotheses for the emergence of life from prebiotic chemistry.
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Registered trials
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