Growth and division of active droplets provides a model for protocells
By David Zwicker, Rabea Seyboldt, C. Weber, Anthony A. Hyman, Frank Jülicher. Nature Physics, 2016
392 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction centres. However, whether these droplets could divide and propagate is unclear. Here we examine the behaviour of droplets in systems that are maintained away from thermodynamic equilibrium by an external supply of energy. In these systems, droplets grow by the addition of droplet material generated by chemical reactions. Surprisingly, we find that chemically driven droplet growth can lead to shape instabilities that trigger the division of droplets into two smaller daughters. Therefore, chemically active droplets can exhibit cycles of growth and division that resemble the proliferation of living cells. Dividing active droplets could serve as a model for prebiotic protocells, where chemical reactions in the droplet play the role of a prebiotic metabolism. Droplets are an appealing picture for protocells in origin-of-life studies, but it’s unclear how they would have propagated by growth and division. Theory suggests that chemically active droplets spontaneously split into equal daughter droplets.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d2dff1b936a302393e473326e94da3635dd5d66
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In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Scalar Active Mixtures: The Nonreciprocal Cahn-Hilliard Model (2020, background): “Number conservation of each individual component is a defining feature of our model, and one that strongly differentiates it from other multicomponent systems that show oscillatory instabilities, such as reaction-diffusion systems [34] or Cahn-Hilliard-type models for phase separation coupled to out”