Kazushi Kinbara

Journal of the American Chemical Society Cite this: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, XXXX, XXX Click to copy citationCitation copied! . This publication is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 . You are free to share (copy and redistribute) this article in any medium or format within the parameters below: Creative Commons (CC): This is a Creative Commons license. Attribution (BY): Credit must be given to the creator. Non-Commercial (NC): Only non-commercial uses of the work are permitted.

To investigate whether the caged decanoic acid ( CDA ) or decanoic acid ( DA ) is spontaneously incorporated into a lipid bilayer, we performed a 100 ns MD simulation of a membrane–water system containing a single CDA or DA molecule dissolved in the aqueous phase. As the initial configuration, the center of mass (COM) of each molecule was placed 4 nm from the bilayer midplane along the membrane normal ( Figure 5 a,d).

The construction of synthetic cells holds great importance for exploring complex biological systems and could potentially provide insights into the origins of life. Now, synthetic gap junctional channels have been developed as a building block to construct synthetic cells that can mediate intercellular transport of ions and bioactive species.