coacervate

Dr. Moran Frenkel-Pinter, a research scientist at the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution, told Salon that "this outstanding research by Tawfik, Metanis, and colleagues offers a look back in time at plausible primordial forms of early proteins. These ancestral peptides carrying ornithine, a relatively simple amino acid that is believed to have been abundant on the prebiotic Earth but is not found in contemporary proteins, were shown to interact with nucleic acids and form coacervate structures."

Dr. Stewart’s adhesive forms what chemists call a complex coacervate, a kind of molecular circling of the wagons against water.