Life on Earth may have begun as dividing droplets

NEW ORLEANS — In a primordial soup on ancient Earth, droplets of chemicals may have paved the way for the first cells. Shape-shifting droplets split, grow and split again in new computer simulations. The result indicates that simple chemical blobs can exhibit replication, one of the most basic properties of life, physicist Rabea Seyboldt of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, reported March 16 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

Within a liquid, small droplets of particular chemicals can separate out, like beads of oil in water. Such globules typically remain spherical, growing as they merge with other drops. But in simulations, Seyboldt and colleagues found that droplets might behave in a counterintuitive way under certain conditions, elongating and eventually dividing into two.

If additional droplet material is continuously produced in reactions in the primordial soup, chemicals will accumulate on either end of a droplet, causing it to elongate, the simulations show. Meanwhile, waste products from the droplet are eliminated from the middle, causing the droplet to pinch in and eventually split. The resulting pair of droplets would then grow and split again to create a new generation. In addition to the above reactions, the process requires an energy source, such as heat or chemicals from a hydrothermal vent, to get reactions going.

The study, which was also described in Nature Physics in December, is theoretical — the researchers didn’t select particular chemicals for study but simply showed that certain types of reactions could cause droplets to split.

How such droplets would have evolved into vastly more complicated cells is unknown. “This is really a minimal scenario that’s supposed to give the very first indications of something that goes towards life, but if you look at living cells today, they’re infinitely more complex,” Seyboldt said.