Spatial organization is a defining characteristic of all living organisms but has been challenging to engineer from the bottom up. By colocalizing specific reactions and separating others, synthetic compartments have the potential to improve the biochemical capabilities of artificial cells and cell-free systems. How can we encode spatial organization in a nucleotide sequence? To answer this...
Molecular self-assembly is when molecules combine into superstructures held together through non-covalent interactions. Over the last decades, supramolecular chemists have perfected this art, and we can now create Gigadalton structures in which each atom is placed with angstrom precision. More importantly, the unique properties of the emerging assemblies have found their way into everyday...
The most profound transition in the biochemistry of life is thought to have been the one from a primordial RNA-peptide world to the modern DNA-protein world. The reasons for this transition are a matter of speculation, but may have included changes in planetary conditions that disfavored long RNA molecules. Whatever the reasons, the original combination of both catalysis and replication in one...
