Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cells exercise size homeostasis, and the origins of their ability to do so is the topic of this essay. Before there were cells, there were protocells. The most basic questions about protocells as objects are: What were they made of, and how big were they? Asking how big they were implies that the answer to the first part includes a boundary. The best candidate for that boundary is a self-assembling lipid bilayer. Therefore, protocells are defined here as Darwinian liposomes-bilayer vesicles with mutable on-board replicases linked to phenotypes. Because liposomes undergo spontaneous fission and fusion, and are subject to osmotic forces, size regulation in the earliest protocells would essentially have been liposome physics. For successful protocells, averting osmotic lysis would have been the first order of business. However, from the outset size mattered too, because of sex and reproduction (i.e., genome mixing and genome copying in entities with phenotypes). Protocell fission and fusion would have blended seamlessly into protocell sex and reproduction, making any gene product that furnished control over protocell size changes doubly adaptive. A recurrent theme is the feedback role of bilayer tension in protocell size control. Ways in which primitive peptides and their aggregates (e.g., channels) might have allowed liposomes to gain improved volume and surface area homeostasis are suggested. Domain-swapped proteins that polymerize as filaments are discussed as the origin of cytoskeleton structures that diversify and stabilize liposome shapes and sizes. Throughout, attention is paid to the question of set points for cell size.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".