Journal article
A chemically fuelled self-replicator
- Abstract:
- The continuous consumption of chemical energy powers biological systems so that they can operate functional supramolecular structures. A goal of modern science is to understand how simple chemical mixtures may transition from non-living components to truly emergent systems and the production of new lifelike materials and machines. In this work a replicator can be maintained out-of-equilibrium by the continuous consumption of chemical energy. The system is driven by the autocatalytic formation of a metastable surfactant whose breakdown products are converted back into building blocks by a chemical fuel. The consumption of fuel allows the high-energy replicators to persist at a steady state, much like a simple metabolic cycle. Thermodynamically-driven reactions effect a unidirectional substrate flux as the system tries to regain equilibrium. The metastable replicator persists at a higher concentration than achieved even transiently in a closed system, and its concentration is responsive to the rate of fuel supply.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.0MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-019-08885-9
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 10
- Article number:
- 1011
- Publication date:
- 2019-03-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-02-06
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:969036
- UUID:
-
uuid:be24fff0-f36e-4890-ac3b-6a3abd32a019
- Local pid:
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pubs:969036
- Source identifiers:
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969036
- Deposit date:
-
2019-02-06
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Morrow et al
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Notes:
- © The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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