ArticleJournal of the American Chemical Society2021
Thermally Driven Membrane Phase Transitions Enable Content Reshuffling in Primitive Cells.
Article in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continuous UV irradiation played an inconclusive role in selecting the canonical genetic alphabet.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Hydroxy acid conjugation to lipids increases structural and hydrolytic stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Repetitive temperature cycles with DMSO sustain RNA replicating liposome compartments via fusion mediated content exchange.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Organocatalyzed bottom-up formation of protocells.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Stimuli-Responsive Chemical Systems That Mimic Biological Dynamics.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Review
- Physical Frameworks and Theories on How Autonomous Biological Oscillators Synchronize.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Differential stability and dynamics of DNA-based and RNA-based coacervates affect non-enzymatic RNA chemistry.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Abiotic lipid metabolism enables membrane plasticity in artificial cells.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Selective peptide bond formation via side chain reactivity and self-assembly of abiotic phosphates.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Membraneless protocell confined by a heat flow.Nature physics · 2025Article
- Chemically Driven Division of Protocells by Membrane Budding.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Enzyme-Responsive DNA Condensates.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Lipid vesicle-based molecular robots.Lab on a chip · 2024Review
- From the RNA-Peptide World: Prebiotic Reaction Conditions Compatible with Lipid Membranes for the Formation of Lipophilic Random Peptides in the Presence of Short Oligonucleotides, and More.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Periodic temperature changes drive the proliferation of self-replicating RNAs in vesicle populations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Elucidating N-acyl amino acids as a model protoamphiphilic system.Communications chemistry · 2022Article
- A Physicochemical Consideration of Prebiotic Microenvironments for Self-Assembly and Prebiotic Chemistry.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Growth, replication and division enable evolution of coacervate protocells.Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) · 2022Review
- Motile behaviour of droplets in lipid systems.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2022Review
- Alkanes as Membrane Regulators of the Response of Early Membranes to Extreme Temperatures.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Self-assembling single-chain amphiphiles available in the prebiotic environment likely played a fundamental role in the advent of primitive cell cycles. However, the instability of prebiotic fatty acid-based membranes to temperature and pH seems to suggest that primitive cells could only host prebiotically relevant processes in a narrow range of nonfluctuating environmental conditions. Here we propose that membrane phase transitions, driven by environmental fluctuations, enabled the generation of daughter protocells with reshuffled content. A reversible membrane-to-oil phase transition accounts for the dissolution of fatty acid-based vesicles at high temperatures and the concomitant release of protocellular content. At low temperatures, fatty acid bilayers reassemble and encapsulate reshuffled material in a new cohort of protocells. Notably, we find that our disassembly/reassembly cycle drives the emergence of functional RNA-containing primitive cells from parent nonfunctional compartments. Thus, by exploiting the intrinsic instability of prebiotic fatty acid vesicles, our results point at an environmentally driven tunable prebiotic process, which supports the release and reshuffling of oligonucleotides and membrane components, potentially leading to a new generation of protocells with superior traits. In the absence of protocellular transport machinery, the environmentally driven disassembly/assembly cycle proposed herein would have plausibly supported protocellular content reshuffling transmitted to primitive cell progeny, hinting at a potential mechanism important to initiate Darwinian evolution of early life forms.
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