Self-Organized Bioelectricity via Collective Pump Alignment: Toward a Physical Origin of Chemiosmosis

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal model demonstrating how collective pump alignment driven by electrostatic feedback can self-organize to produce bioelectricity, offering insights into the physical origins of chemiosmosis in primitive cells.

Contribution

It introduces a self-organizing mechanism for ion pump alignment and bioelectricity emergence, linking nonequilibrium ion transport to membrane potential formation in protocells.

Findings

Numerical simulations show a transition to pump alignment with sustained membrane potential.

The critical behavior aligns with the mean-field Ising universality class.

Protocell asymmetry influences membrane potential polarity.

Abstract

Directional ion transport across membranes maintains living systems in nonequilibrium, which underlies chemiosmotic energy conversion. However, the physical origin of collectively organized ion transport in primitive cellular systems remains unclear. Here, we propose a minimal model in which ion pumps collectively align through feedback between ion transport and electrostatic interactions. In the model, directional ion transport generates a membrane potential, while the resulting electrochemical potential biases pump orientation, leading to self-organized collective alignment. Numerical simulations and mean-field analysis reveal a nonequilibrium transition from a disordered state without net transport to a pump-alignment state with sustained membrane potentials. The critical behavior is consistent with the mean-field Ising universality class; however, the effective field is generated self-consistently by nonequilibrium ion transport. We further show that protocell asymmetry can bias the polarity of the membrane potential. These results provide a generic self-organizing mechanism for the emergence of bioelectricity and a physical route toward chemiosmotic coupling in protocells.