The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A chemically fuelled self-replicator
Open accessAbstract
The continuous consumption of chemical energy powers biological systems so that they can operate functional supramolecular structures. A goal of modern science is to understand how simple chemical mixtures may transition from non-living components to truly emergent systems and the production of new lifelike materials and machines. In this work a replicator can be maintained out-of-equilibrium by the continuous consumption of chemical energy. The system is driven by the autocatalytic formation of a metastable surfactant whose breakdown products are converted back into building blocks by a chemical fuel. The consumption of fuel allows the high-energy replicators to persist at a steady state, much like a simple metabolic cycle. Thermodynamically-driven reactions effect a unidirectional substrate flux as the system tries to regain equilibrium. The metastable replicator persists at a higher concentration than achieved even transiently in a closed system, and its concentration is responsive to the rate of fuel supply.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Lee, D. H., Granja, J. R., Martinez, J. A., Severin, K., & Ghadiri, M. R. (1996) · Nature · doi:10.1038/382525a0 · Cited by 677
Ashkenasy, G., Hermans, T. M., Otto, S., & Taylor, A. F. (2017) · Chemical Society Reviews · doi:10.1039/c7cs00117g · Cited by 595
A Self‐Replicating Hexadeoxynucleotide
von Kiedrowski, G. (1986) · Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English · doi:10.1002/anie.198609322 · Cited by 583
Kurihara, K., Tamura, M., Shohda, K.-I., Toyota, T., Suzuki, K., & Sugawara, T. (2011) · Nature Chemistry · doi:10.1038/nchem.1127 · Cited by 559
Autocatalytic self-replicating micelles as models for prebiotic structures
Bachmann, P. A., Luisi, P. L., & Lang, J. (1992) · Nature · doi:10.1038/357057a0 · Cited by 494
Tjivikua, T., Ballester, P., & Rebek, J. (1990) · Journal of the American Chemical Society · doi:10.1021/ja00159a057 · Cited by 389
Autocatalytic, bistable, oscillatory networks of biologically relevant organic reactions
Semenov, S. N., Kraft, L. J., Ainla, A., Zhao, M., Baghbanzadeh, M., Campbell, V. E., Kang, K., Fox, J. M., & Whitesides, G. M. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature19776 · Cited by 350
A chiroselective peptide replicator
Saghatelian, A., Yokobayashi, Y., Soltani, K., & Ghadiri, M. R. (2001) · Nature · doi:10.1038/35057238 · Cited by 310
Diversification of self-replicating molecules
Sadownik, J. W., Mattia, E., Nowak, P., & Otto, S. (2016) · Nature Chemistry · doi:10.1038/nchem.2419 · Cited by 214
Towards open-ended evolution in self-replicating molecular systems
Duim, H., & Otto, S. (2017) · Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry · doi:10.3762/bjoc.13.118 · Cited by 72
Cited by
Active coacervate droplets as a model for membraneless organelles and protocells
Donau, C., Späth, F., Sosson, M., Kriebisch, B. A. K., Schnitter, F., Tena-Solsona, M., Kang, H.-S., Salibi, E., Sattler, M., Mutschler, H., et al. (2020) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18815-9 · Cited by 309
Chemical Fueling Enables Molecular Complexification of Self‐Replicators**
Yang, S., Schaeffer, G., Mattia, E., Markovitch, O., Liu, K., Hussain, A. S., Ottelé, J., Sood, A., & Otto, S. (2021) · Angewandte Chemie International Edition · doi:10.1002/anie.202016196 · Cited by 86
Liu, B., Wu, J., Geerts, M., Markovitch, O., Pappas, C. G., Liu, K., & Otto, S. (2022) · Angewandte Chemie International Edition · doi:10.1002/anie.202117605 · Cited by 60
Dissipative self-assembly, competition and inhibition in a self-reproducing protocell model
Post, E. A. J., & Fletcher, S. P. (2020) · Chemical Science · doi:10.1039/d0sc02768e · Cited by 57
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Morrow, S. M., Colomer, I., & Fletcher, S. P.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2019-03-01
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1011-1011
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2919993307
- Cited by
- 166
- References
- 11
- FWCI
- 12.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A chemically fuelled self-replicator. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-019-08885-9
- The paper
- Morrow, S. M., Colomer, I., & Fletcher, S. P. (2019). A chemically fuelled self-replicator. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08885-9
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.