Sprecher
Beschreibung
Sudha Rajamani
The emergence of cellular life would have been a vital step during life’s origin and early evolution. This event would have been influenced by membrane evolution; a process that would have resulted in emergent properties in protocells/membrane-bound vesicles, which can be used as proxies for discerning how molecular evolution would have shaped early amphiphilic landscapes. We evaluated this in the context of an ‘interacting populations paradigm’, wherein distinct chemical compositions of single chain amphiphile (SCA)-based protocells were used to formulate unique protocellular "species" with different physicochemical properties and environmental fitness profiles. In this backdrop, we explored how protocell interactions could have resulted in emergent properties that conferred fitness benefits (functional advantages), sometimes to the system per se, under prebiotic settings. The empirical insights that we gleaned into the ‘evolution’ of membrane functionalities demonstrate how their inherent dynamicity, and the physicochemical diversity in the niche, could have fostered functional advantages in dynamically interacting protocell compartments. Importantly, this approach circumvents the risk of oversimplifying the ecological and chemical realities that would have been inherent in early Earth environments.