Figure 10.

Synthetic protocells. (a) A common component of most protocells is a spherical vesicle involving a lipid bilayer. In (b), we show a minimal model of an autopoietic cell, where an external precursor P gets transformed into surfactant molecules S and can also degrade under the presence of a given Y, into a waste product W. Here, S,V and V_c stand for external surface, total and internal volumes, respectively. One version of Ganti's chemoton is shown in (c). Here, the metabolic cycle is indicated by M = {A_j} and z_k are external resources. In this example, two types of templates, indicated by T₁, T₂, coexist in the same cell. Three different synthetic protocell cycles are shown in (d–f): (d) an RNA-based heterotrophic protocell [84]; (e) Kurihara et al.'s model [85] and (f) after [86].