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Record W4406313049 · doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.4c00761

Synthetic Lipid Biology

2025· review· en· W4406313049 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Po-Hsun Brian Chen, Xiangling Li, Jeremy M. Baskin

Bibliographic record

VenueChemical Reviews · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicMicrobial Metabolic Engineering and Bioproduction
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNational Institute of General Medical SciencesNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsBioorthogonal chemistryChemistrySynthetic biologyChemical biologyBiological membraneProtocellMembrane biophysicsBiomoleculeMembraneNanotechnologyComputational biologyBiochemistryBiologyCombinatorial chemistryClick chemistry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Cells contain thousands of different lipids. Their rapid and redundant metabolism, dynamic movement, and many interactions with other biomolecules have justly earned lipids a reputation as a vexing class of molecules to understand. Further, as the cell's hydrophobic metabolites, lipids assemble into supramolecular structures─most commonly bilayers, or membranes─from which they carry out myriad biological functions. Motivated by this daunting complexity, researchers across disciplines are bringing order to the seeming chaos of biological lipids and membranes. Here, we formalize these efforts as "synthetic lipid biology". Inspired by the idea, central to synthetic biology, that our abilities to understand and build biological systems are intimately connected, we organize studies and approaches across numerous fields to create, manipulate, and analyze lipids and biomembranes. These include construction of lipids and membranes from scratch using chemical and chemoenzymatic synthesis, editing of pre-existing membranes using optogenetics and protein engineering, detection of lipid metabolism and transport using bioorthogonal chemistry, and probing of lipid-protein interactions and membrane biophysical properties. What emerges is a portrait of an incipient field where chemists, biologists, physicists, and engineers work together in proximity─like lipids themselves─to build a clearer description of the properties, behaviors, and functions of lipids and membranes.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.028

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.003
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.009

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.327
Teacher spread0.303 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations25
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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