Coacervates as compartments for the de novo synthesis of life
Creating a fully synthetic living system from scratch (de novo life) represents one of the grand challenges in modern science. Such a system must possess the core characteristics shared by all living entities — including replication, metabolism, compartmentalization within an out-of-equilibrium regime, and the capacity for Darwinian evolution. While self-replication and metabolism have been demonstrated separately in fully synthetic systems, their integration with compartmentalization remains unresolved. In his thesis, Armin Kiani presents coacervates he developed as compartments for de novo life, and for the first time, Kiani demonstrated how key pillars of living systems, replication and proto-metabolism, can be functionally integrated within coacervate structures.
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