Recent advances in membranized coacervates as functional compartments: synthetic strategies and mechanisms for prototissues

Abstract

Compartmentalization, a defining feature of living cells, has inspired the engineering of functional microcompartments that organize reactions and transport in cell-mimetic ways. Among current strategies, bottom-up approaches have attracted particular attention because they assemble synthetic compartments from nonliving building blocks such as polymers, peptides, and lipids. Herein, we review recent advances in complex coacervates as versatile platforms for protocells, with an emphasis on multiphase organization, key physicochemical properties, and structure–function relationships that govern assembly, stability, and regulated exchange. We further highlight major formation and functionalization routes, boundary reinforcement (membranes or membrane-like shells), stimulus-triggered droplet-to-vesicle transitions, and hierarchical assembly into prototissues, which enable controlled encapsulation, intercompartmental communication, and collective functions, such as distributed catalysis and homeostatic regulation. Finally, we discuss biomedical opportunities of coacervate-based compartments and outline future directions toward robust, programmable, and life-like artificial systems that sharpen design rules at the interface of synthetic constructs and living matter.