ArticleNature communications2021
Active coacervate droplets are protocells that grow and resist Ostwald ripening.
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 80 papers.
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Who cites it
80 citing papers in PubMed.
- Biomolecular coacervation-mediated materials: Phase states, phase transitions, and biomedical applications.Bioactive materials · 2027Review
- Pathway Controlled Phase Separation of Minimal Building Blocks Utilizing a Dissociative Chemical Transformation.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Sustained formation movement and destruction of coacervates in a waste-free system driven by electricity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Phase separation across membranes and condensates in cell organization and function.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2026Review
- Supramolecular nanofiber stabilization of microdroplets enables ultra-sensitive virus infection analysis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- RNA and proteins joined up at the Origins of Life: Persistence is the point.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Programmable Spatial Demixing in Prebiotic Coacervates.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Deuterated Water Accelerates Phase-Separated Droplet Formation and Enables Directional Motion.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- Entropic Charge Separation as a General Mechanism Arresting Nanoscale Condensate Coarsening.Physical review letters · 2026Article
- Modeling Opposite Effects of an Additive on Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation and Crystal Solubility of Protein Solutions.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- MgChem & bio engineering · 2026Article
- Bottom-Up Coacervate-Based Artificial Cells: Integrating Cellular Hallmarks into Complex Life-Like Systems.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Review
- Biomolecular Condensates as Protein Degradation Tools for Intracellular Targets.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Phase separation induced by active polymerization makes protocells robust against environmental changes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Protein coacervation-driven active forces power protocell dynamics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Optically driven control of mechanochemistry and fusion dynamics of biomolecular condensates via thymine dimerization.Nature communications · 2026Article
- DNA affects the phenotype of fuel-dependent coacervate droplets.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Recent advances in coacervate protocells from passive catalysts to chemically programmable systems.Communications chemistry · 2026Review
- Emergent properties of supramolecular peptide assemblies.Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Complex Coacervate Emulsions as a Strategy to Stabilize Enzymes for Catalysis in Organic Solvents.ACS macro letters · 2026Article
20 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Active coacervate droplets are liquid condensates coupled to a chemical reaction that turns over their components, keeping the droplets out of equilibrium. This turnover can be used to drive active processes such as growth, and provide an insight into the chemical requirements underlying (proto)cellular behaviour. Moreover, controlled growth is a key requirement to achieve population fitness and survival. Here we present a minimal, nucleotide-based coacervate model for active droplets, and report three key findings that make these droplets into evolvable protocells. First, we show that coacervate droplets form and grow by the fuel-driven synthesis of new coacervate material. Second, we find that these droplets do not undergo Ostwald ripening, which we attribute to the attractive electrostatic interactions and translational entropy within complex coacervates, active or passive. Finally, we show that the droplet growth rate reflects experimental conditions such as substrate, enzyme and protein concentration, and that a different droplet composition (addition of RNA) leads to altered growth rates and droplet fitness. These findings together make active coacervate droplets a powerful platform to mimic cellular growth at a single-droplet level, and to study fitness at a population level.
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