Abstract
AbstractChemically fueled emulsions are solutions with droplets made of phase‐separated molecules that are activated and deactivated by a chemical reaction cycle. These emulsions play a crucial role in biology as a class of membrane‐less organelles. Moreover, theoretical studies show that droplets in these emulsions can evolve to the same size or spontaneously self‐divide when fuel is abundant. All of these exciting properties, i. e., emergence, decay, collective behavior, and self‐division, are pivotal to the functioning of life. However, these theoretical predictions lack experimental systems to test them quantitively. Here, we describe the synthesis of synthetic emulsions formed by a fuel‐driven chemical cycle, and we find a surprising new behavior, i. e., the dynamics of droplet growth is regulated by the kinetics of the fuel‐driven reaction cycle. Consequently, the average volume of these droplets grows orders of magnitude faster compared to Ostwald ripening. Combining experiments and theory, we elucidate the underlying mechanism.
Highlights
Introduction main constituent proteins ofP-granules[8] or stress granules[5]involves a chemical reaction cycle fueled by the hydrolysis of ATP.[9]
Quantitative agreement between experiments and theory, we propose a mechanism where the fuel-driven chemical reaction cycle can accelerate the growth of the average droplet volume
All emulsions in this work follow the same experimental design (Figure 1), i. e., a water-soluble precursor (A) molecule is activated by an irreversible reaction with a fuel.[38,39]
Summary
Involves a chemical reaction cycle fueled by the hydrolysis of ATP.[9] Theoretical studies have shown that droplets in such chemically fueled emulsions can exhibit a set of different properties compared to emulsions approaching thermal equilibrium. The droplet size within these emulsions can be regulated by the kinetics of the chemical reactions.[10,11] the droplet position and the position of particles within the droplets can be controlled.[12,13,14] theoretical studies have shown that the droplets in these emulsions can spontaneously divide.[15,16] these theoretical predictions lack experimental systems to test them quantitively. Examples of synthetic molecular assemblies regulated by fuel-driven reaction cycles have been described, including chemically[17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]
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