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Origin of life

Division for multiplication

Nature Physics volume 13, pages 323–324 (2017)Cite this article

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Early forms of life could have started by molecular compounds coming together under conditions dense enough to promote reactions. But how might these droplets have undergone what we now know as cell division? The answer may be simpler than we think.

In 1924, Alexander Oparin1 put forward a picture to describe how life might have emerged from what J. B. S. Haldane later called the prebiotic soup2. He proposed a scenario in which chemically active droplets would grow and divide, and thereby resemble a living entity — that is, a cell. But what physical mechanism would allow this selection of size and the underling process of division to occur? Writing in Nature Physics3, David Zwicker and colleagues provide the rather remarkable answer to this question: when we have a chemically active droplet with non-vanishing fluxes — a basic form of metabolism — this happens naturally, and there is no need to endow the system with an additional mechanism to ensure it happens.

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Figure 1: Comparison to Ostwald ripening.
Figure 2: Analogy to Rayleigh instability.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ramin Golestanian is at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3NP, UK ,

    Ramin Golestanian

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  1. Ramin Golestanian
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Correspondence to Ramin Golestanian.

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Golestanian, R. Division for multiplication. Nature Phys 13, 323–324 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3998

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