ArticleCommunications chemistry2020
Dehydration entropy drives liquid-liquid phase separation by molecular crowding.
Article in Communications chemistry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 73 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
73 citing papers in PubMed, 193 citations in OpenAlex.
- Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation-Enhanced Multienzyme Catalysis: Mechanisms and Applications.ChemSusChem · 2026Review
- Sticker Valence Governs Chain Collapse and Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation in Peptide-Inspired Associative Polymers.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Arabidopsis WSS1A, a DNA-protein crosslink repair protease, delays leaf senescence in cooperation with SUMO3.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2026Article
- Programmable Spatial Demixing in Prebiotic Coacervates.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Dysregulation of liquid-liquid phase separation: from molecular mechanisms to targeted therapies in cardiovascular diseases.Journal of nanobiotechnology · 2026Review
- Residue-level mapping of crowding effects on protein phase separation.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2026Article
- Arresting Microphase Separation Encodes Material Mechanics by Sculpting Microarchitectures and Local Polymer Enrichment.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- From biomolecular condensates to functional nanomaterials: LLPS-inspired frameworks for nanoscale hydrogels and adaptive materials.Journal of nanobiotechnology · 2026Review
- Chemical interactions in polyethylene glycol-induced condensates lead to an anomalous FRET response from a flexible linker-fluorescent protein crowding sensor.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A global thermodynamic-kinetic model capturing the hallmarks of liquid-liquid phase separation and amyloid aggregation.Cell reports. Physical science · 2026Article
- Stability of non-canonical nucleic acid structure as a potential modulator of cell fate.Nucleic acids research · 2026Review
- Entropy-Driven Amino Acid-Based Coacervates with Enzyme-Free Metabolism and Prebiotic Robustness.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- APOE Genotype Difference in the Biphasic Modulation of Amyloid-β Aggregation by Direct Binding and Lowering the Nucleation Barrier.Biomacromolecules · 2025Article
- Quantification of redox thermodynamics shifts within coacervates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- G4 Oligonucleotide-Based Chaperones of Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein A1.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Role of Charge Patterning and Hydrophobicity in Peptide-Based Complex Coacervates.Biomacromolecules · 2025Article
- Mellitic Acid as a Stable Abiotic Precursor for Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation: An RNA-Independent Pathway for Prebiotic Compartmentalization.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2025Article
- Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation from the Viewpoint of Molecular Crowding Environment: A Raman Imaging Study.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2025Review
- Article
13 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Complex coacervation driven liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) of biopolymers has been attracting attention as a novel phase in living cells. Studies of LLPS in this context are typically of proteins harboring chemical and structural complexity, leaving unclear which properties are fundamental to complex coacervation versus protein-specific. This study focuses on the role of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-a widely used molecular crowder-in LLPS. Significantly, entropy-driven LLPS is recapitulated with charged polymers lacking hydrophobicity and sequence complexity, and its propensity dramatically enhanced by PEG. Experimental and field-theoretic simulation results are consistent with PEG driving LLPS by dehydration of polymers, and show that PEG exerts its effect without partitioning into the dense coacervate phase. It is then up to biology to impose additional variations of functional significance to the LLPS of biological systems.
Identifiers
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.