Negative Membrane Potentials Potentiate Multicellularity

Abstract

Why did evolution almost exclusively select negative membrane potentials? Why did natural selection not favour positive membrane potentials? Further, membrane constituents are also negatively charged, in the form phospholipids. Putative cis-charge repulsion represents an obstacle to the emergency of multicellularity. This is compounded by the fact that cells at the centre of nascent multicellular species are deprived of nutrients by diffusion and exposed to the highest levels metabolic detritus. Multicellularity appears ab initio maladaptive.We present the hypothesis here that multicellularity may have been initiated, driven and potentiated by purely physical processes - one classical and one quantum. In water, negatively charged particles in the nano- to macro-molecular size-range, can aggregate, while positively charged repel one another. This counter-intuitive phenomenon has been consistently observed and recently attributed to the orientation of water molecules against the negatively charged surface and their re-orientation as negatively charged particles approach. This classical attraction works at long range, on a macromolecular scale. As two interfaces approximate closer, there is quantum attraction. Quantum nuclear effects of water hydrogen atoms are accentuated at interfacial layers compared to the bulk, due to the contraction of hydrogen bonds. This creates differences between the interfacial water and bulk in quantum free energy, which is only extinguished with the extrusion of intervening water. Quantum and classical attraction cooperate to initiate and stabilise multicellularity, while the whole process is possible because the membrane potential is negative and hydrogen is the dominant isotope rather deuterium or tritium.

Keywords: negative membrane potential, like charge attraction, multi-cellular, multi-cellularity, endosymbiosis, endosymbiont