ArticleNature chemistry2025
Competitive exclusion among self-replicating molecules curtails the tendency of chemistry to diversify.
Article in Nature chemistry, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Light-Driven Competitive Selection in a Protein-Catalyzed Dissipative Peptide Replication.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Theory for sequence selection via phase separation and oligomerization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Emergent properties of supramolecular peptide assemblies.Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) · 2026Review
- Stimuli-Responsive Chemical Systems That Mimic Biological Dynamics.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Review
- Metabolism-inspired chemical reaction networks for chemically driven dissipative oligoesterification.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Covalent Dynamic DNA Networks to Translate Multiple Inputs into Programmable Outputs.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Cyclic amine ring expansion.Nature chemistry · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The transition of chemistry into biology is poorly understood. Key questions include how the inherently divergent nature of chemical reactions can be curtailed, and whether Darwinian principles from biology extend to chemistry. Addressing both questions simultaneously, we now show that the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion, which states that a single niche can be stably occupied by only one species, also applies to self-replicating chemical systems, and that this principle diminishes the tendency of chemistry to diversify. Specifically, we report two systems in which three different self-replicator quasi-species emerge in a largely stochastic fashion from a mixture of two building blocks (resources). Competitive exclusion leads to the selection of only a single quasi-species when all replicators rely to the same extent on both resources. When one of the quasi-species preferentially uses one resource and another quasi-species specializes in the other (resource partitioning), these replicator quasi-species effectively occupy different niches and were found to coexist in an evolutionary stable steady state.
Identifiers
39613869What 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.