Fractal Colonization of Prebiotic Niches: Mechanical Budding of Nano-vesicles and Kinetic Resource Depletion as an Oncological Atavism
Abstract
Periodic mechanical forcing of the early Earth, from lunar tides (period of about 10 h) and radiogenic geysers (about 15 min) to von Kármán vortex shedding (about 1 s), may have loaded fatty-acid protocell membranes on time scales comparable to their relaxation times. We present a minimal model in which the tension of a parent vesicle, relaxing with time constant τ under rectified periodic forcing, releases one nano-vesicle at each upward crossing of a budding threshold. The shed nano-vesicles deplete the free fatty-acid pool of the surrounding niche through a non-linear sink bounded by the critical micelle concentration (CMC). The depletion equation has an exact solution between shedding events, and numerical integration with illustrative parameters shows that the discrete, tension-gated release produces a staircase of quasi-steady monomer levels that the pool follows towards the CMC. We discuss a matching window fτ = O(1) as a possible paleophysical selection criterion and, as a hypothesis not tested here, an analogy with vesicle-mediated nutrient competition in tumour niches.
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BibTeX
@misc{mikulas2026fractal,
title = {{Fractal Colonization of Prebiotic Niches: Mechanical Budding of Nano-vesicles and Kinetic Resource Depletion as an Oncological Atavism}},
author = {Peter Mikuláš},
howpublished = {ChemRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.26434/chemrxiv.15009389/v1},
url = {https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15009389/v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fractal Colonization of Prebiotic Niches: Mechanical Budding of Nano-vesicles and Kinetic Resource Depletion as an Oncological Atavism
AU - Peter Mikuláš
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - ChemRxiv
DO - 10.26434/chemrxiv.15009389/v1
UR - https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15009389/v1
AB - Periodic mechanical forcing of the early Earth, from lunar tides (period of about 10 h) and radiogenic geysers (about 15 min) to von Kármán vortex shedding (about 1 s), may have loaded fatty-acid protocell membranes on time scales comparable to their relaxation times. We present a minimal model in which the tension of a parent vesicle, relaxing with time constant τ under rectified periodic forcing, releases one nano-vesicle at each upward crossing of a budding threshold. The shed nano-vesicles deplete the free fatty-acid pool of the surrounding niche through a non-linear sink bounded by the critical micelle concentration (CMC). The depletion equation has an exact solution between shedding events, and numerical integration with illustrative parameters shows that the discrete, tension-gated release produces a staircase of quasi-steady monomer levels that the pool follows towards the CMC. We discuss a matching window fτ = O(1) as a possible paleophysical selection criterion and, as a hypothesis not tested here, an analogy with vesicle-mediated nutrient competition in tumour niches.
ER -