ReviewNature reviews. Chemistry2021
Self-reproducing catalytic micelles as nanoscopic protocell precursors.
Review in Nature reviews. Chemistry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 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.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 79 citations in OpenAlex.
- Functional abiotic metabolite assembly hypothesis for the early events in the origin of life.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Biomolecular condensates can function as inherent catalysts.Molecular cell · 2026Article
- Hydroxy acid conjugation to lipids increases structural and hydrolytic stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Prebiotically Plausible Vesicle Populations Can Respond to Selection for Greater Turbidity via Emergent Cooperative Dynamics.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2026Article
- Replicating lipid micelles: a feasible precursor to the origin of life and the earliest appearance of genomes.Human genomics · 2026Review
- Prebiotic β-Strand Peptides May Be a Plausible Solution to the Protocell Permeability Problem.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Review
- The RNA-First Fallacy: Conflating Evolutionary Ancestry with Prebiotic Primacy.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Biomarkers on the Icy Jovian Moons: Can Europa Also Provide Insights into Life's Origin?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Evolution from Composome to RNA Replicase.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Emergent properties of supramolecular peptide assemblies.Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Condenzymes: Biomolecular condensates with inherent catalytic activities.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Evolution of complex chemical mixtures reveals combinatorial compression and population synchronicity.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Autocatalytic Nucleation and Self-Assembly of Inorganic Nanoparticles into Complex Biosimilar Networks.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- In vitro Evaluation of Mitochondrial-Targeted Andrographolide Nanoparticles Against 4T1 Breast Cancer Cells.International journal of nanomedicine · 2025Article
- Nrf1 acts as a highly-conserved determinon for maintaining robust redox homeostasis in the eco-evo-devo process of life histories.Cell stress · 2025Review
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Article
- The GARD Prebiotic Reproduction Model Described in Order and Complexity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Evidence of Heritability in Prebiotically Realistic Membrane-Bound Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Concepts of a synthetic minimal cell: Information molecules, metabolic pathways, and vesicle reproduction.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Protocells at life's origin are often conceived as bilayer-enclosed precursors of life, whose self-reproduction rests on the early advent of replicating catalytic biopolymers. This Perspective describes an alternative scenario, wherein reproducing nanoscopic lipid micelles with catalytic capabilities were forerunners of biopolymer-containing protocells. This postulate gains considerable support from experiments describing micellar catalysis and autocatalytic proliferation, and, more recently, from reports on cross-catalysis in mixed micelles that lead to life-like steady-state dynamics. Such results, along with evidence for micellar prebiotic compatibility, synergize with predictions of our chemically stringent computer-simulated model, illustrating how mutually catalytic lipid networks may enable micellar compositional reproduction that could underlie primal selection and evolution. Finally, we highlight studies on how endogenously catalysed lipid modifications could guide further protocellular complexification, including micelle to vesicle transition and monomer to biopolymer progression. These portrayals substantiate the possibility that protocellular evolution could have been seeded by pre-RNA lipid assemblies.
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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.