But the other way around is also true.
Hector designed the replicator to help the droplets live much longer during periods without fuel:

Genotype helps the phenotype.

These droplets compete for fuel, which acts as a selection pressure—if you, as a droplet, survive to the next round of fuel, you get to “live” another few minutes. If not, you start over again.

But, whether they survive or not, is completely stochastic—they have no genotype.

The work builds on our efforts towards synthetic life—a system capable of Darwinian evolution based on non-biological building blocks.

We use our fuel-dependent synthetic cells—droplets that emerge and grow when fuel is present, but decay when you forget to feed them.

Freshly published: "Primitive genotype-phenotype coupling in fuel-dependent synthetic cells"

Amazing work and a critical step towards synthetic life by Hector Soria and Leonie Kauling. A thread will follow soon:
t.co/9LfrnVYzoq

The offspring is short-lived without fuel. But we can save them by timing our refueling right.
Together with Henrike Niederholtmeyer's team, we built microfluidic devices enabling us to refuel the next generation and keep them "alive".

Check out Monika's work published in @cp-chem.bsky.social!

We’ve engineered synthetic cells that emerge, grow, and produce offspring autonomously, powered by chemical fuel. A significant stride towards synthetic life!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excitingly, when we allow the droplets to fuse, the emulsion starts oscillations between periods of small and large droplets.
Tiny droplets rain down and fuse at the bottom. There, the large droplets shrink and new tiny droplets nucleate on top.

If influx scales with surface area and efflux with volume, tiny droplets grow and big ones should shrink.

That's exactly what we see in the experiments. Droplets adjust their size until they are all the same size.

How can a cell control the size of its organelles?

Excited to share a mechanism to control droplet size we recently found.

a 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, also for protocells. Too much fuel completely converts the vesicles into oil droplets.

That gives beautiful movies, but it is the end of the protocell.

Now published in JACS! Pablo found an easy way to divide fatty acid-based protocells.

Simplicity first: All you need is to add carbodiimide as fuel!

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Accepted! Soon, in your favorite American chemistry journal🥳!