ArticleNature communications2024
A tuneable minimal cell membrane reveals that two lipid species suffice for life.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 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
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Transcriptomic and Metabolomic Analyses of the Mechanisms Underlying Zearalenone Removal byToxins · 2026Article
- The physicochemical design, structure and permeability of the JCVI-syn3A minimal cell membrane.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A lipidomics roadmap: from basic research to societal challenges.Nature communications · 2026Review
- A cationic single-chain bolalipid forms stable vesicles with distinct interfacial behavior.Biophysical journal · 2026Article
- Quantification of cholesterol incorporation in giant unilamellar vesicles produced by a modified cDICE method.Soft matter · 2026Article
- A robust method for on-chip production and manipulation of lipid vesicles by inverted emulsion.Cell reports methods · 2026Article
- An atypical F-type ATPase is necessary for the function of the antibody cleavage system MIB-MIP in mycoplasmas.PLoS pathogens · 2026Article
- Construction of Phospholipid-Like Vesicles by Aqueous Aminolysis of Acyl Thioesters With Diamino Acids.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Article
- Exploring lipid diversity and minimalism to define membrane requirements for synthetic cells.FEBS letters · 2025Review
- The secret life of RNA and lipids.RNA biology · 2025Review
- Synthetic cells by the numbers.iScience · 2025Review
- Evo-Inspired Engineering of Radical Phenotypes and Emergent Traits.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Nothing can replace polyunsaturated lipids.eLife · 2025Article
- Extracellular vesicles of minimalistic Mollicutes as mediators of immune modulation and horizontal gene transfer.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Sterol-lipids enable large-scale, liquid-liquid phase separation in bilayer membranes of only two components.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Update of
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
All cells are encapsulated by a lipid membrane that facilitates their interactions with the environment. How cells manage diverse mixtures of lipids, which dictate membrane property and function, is experimentally challenging to address. Here, we present an approach to tune and minimize membrane lipid composition in the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and its derived 'minimal cell' (JCVI-Syn3A), revealing that a two-component lipidome can support life. Systematic reintroduction of phospholipids with different features demonstrates that acyl chain diversity is more important for growth than head group diversity. By tuning lipid chirality, we explore the lipid divide between Archaea and the rest of life, showing that ancestral lipidomes could have been heterochiral. However, in these simple organisms, heterochirality leads to impaired cellular fitness. Thus, our approach offers a tunable minimal membrane system to explore the fundamental lipidomic requirements for life, thereby extending the concept of minimal life from the genome to the lipidome.
Indexed as
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.