Compositional selection of phospholipid compartments in icy environments drives the enrichment of encapsulated genetic information.

ABSTRACT: The lipid world hypothesis proposes that both intracellular components and the chemical composition of the membrane compartment can act as heritable information, contributing to protocellular fitness. However, there are few experimental demonstrations of membrane compositional selection, and none of them have expanded to the associated transfer of encapsulated contents, representing a possible early form of inheritance. Here, we quantitatively demonstrated that the growth of phospholipid vesicles depends on their lipid composition under freezing and thawing (F/T) cycling: vesicles with more unsaturated bonds in the acyl chain showed higher growth, membrane mixing, and content mixing efficiencies. When vesicles composed of phospholipids with either one or two unsaturated bonds were mixed an

SUBMITTER: Shinoda T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12593001 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature