Population-level Membrane Diversity Triggers Growth and Division of Protocells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To date, multiple mechanisms have been described for the growth and division of model protocells, all of which exploit the cumulative, unidirectional movement of lipids. The aggregate that is more complex grows at the expense of the smaller or less complex aggregate. Imbalances between surface area and volume during growth can generate filamentous vesicles which are typically divided by shear forces. Here we describe another pathway for growth and division that depends simply on differences in composition of fatty acid membranes. Growth is driven by the entropically-favored mixing of lipids between two populations. Division is the result of growth-induced curvature. Importantly, growth and division are cyclic and bidirectional, meaning that vesicles made from one type of lipid, e.g. short-chain fatty acids, grow and divide when fed with vesicles consisting of another type of lipid, e.g. long-chain fatty acids, and vice versa. After equilibration, additional rounds of growth and division are possible through the addition of compositionally distinct vesicles. Since prebiotic synthesis likely gave rise to mixtures of lipids, the data are consistent with the presence of growing and dividing protocells on the prebiotic Earth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".