protobiontn.

1884 Science Oct. 399/1 It is more reasonable to suppose, that..the sexual function exists in the protobionts, which are neither animal nor vegetable.

1961 Proc. National Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 4 1708 [Florkin] recognizes..‘in organic evolution, (1) chemical evolution (before the appearance of the first protobionts); (2) biochemical evolution, leading to the complex array of biochemical catalysts and systems found in present-day cells’.

1964 A. Synge tr. Oparin Chem. Origin Life on Earth iii. 61 The droplets would come to contain a constantly increasing concentration of the corresponding catalysts when the mass of the droplet increased as it grew by polymerising the monomers of the surrounding medium. Such coacervate droplets with an improved organisation are still only hypothetical but, for convenience of discussion, we shall refer to them in what follows by the provisional name of ‘protobionts’.

1978 Sci. Amer. Sept. 65/1 To Oparin the reproductive machinery and DNA are only the ultimate biochemical subtleties that turned metabolically competing protobionts into living cells.

1992 Functional Ecol. 6 110/2 Possibly, in early evolution, near-equilibrium thermodynamics might have governed the bioenergetics of protobionts.