ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Hybrid organic-inorganic structures trigger the formation of primitive cell-like compartments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. 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, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Gypsum Gardens: Self-Assembled Tubular Structures of Calcium Sulfate with Relevance for the Detection of Extraterrestrial Life.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 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
- Diffusion-controlled growth of a planar chemical garden wall before osmotic fracture.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- Gravity-Induced Symmetry Breaking in Chemical Gardens.ACS omega · 2025Article
- Exploring glycolytic enzymes in disease: potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets in neurodegeneration, cancer and parasitic infections.Open biology · 2025Review
- A Fusion-Growth Protocell Model Based on Vesicle Interactions with Pyrite Particles.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Expanded Archaeal Genomes Shed New Light on the Evolution of Isoprenoid Biosynthesis.Microorganisms · 2024Article
- Opinion: The Key Steps in the Origin of Life to the Formation of the Eukaryotic Cell.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Alkaline hydrothermal vents have become a candidate setting for the origins of life on Earth and beyond. This is due to several key features including the presence of gradients of temperature, redox potential, pH, the availability of inorganic minerals, and the existence of a network of inorganic pore spaces that could have served as primitive compartments. Chemical gardens have long been used as experimental proxies for hydrothermal vents. This paper investigates-10pc]Please note that the spelling of the following author name in the manuscript differs from the spelling provided in the article metadata: Richard J. G. Löffler. The spelling provided in the manuscript has been retained; please confirm. a set of prebiotic interactions between such inorganic structures and fatty alcohols. The integration of a medium-chain fatty alcohol, decanol, within these inorganic minerals, produced a range of emergent 3 dimensions structures at both macroscopic and microscopic scales. Fatty alcohols can be considered plausible prebiotic amphiphiles that might have assisted the formation of protocellular structures such as vesicles. The experiments presented herein show that neither chemical gardens nor decanol alone promote vesicle formation, but chemical gardens grown in the presence of decanol, which is then integrated into inorganic mineral structures, support vesicle formation. These observations suggest that the interaction of fatty alcohols and inorganic mineral structures could have played an important role in the emergence of protocells, yielding support for the evolution of living cells.
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