Related papers: Autocatalytic Sets Extended: Dynamics, Inhibition,…
Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks play a central role in living systems, from metabolism at the origin of life, simple RNA networks, and the modern cell, to ecology and cognition. A collectively autocatalytic network that can be…
Two alternative views of an economy are combined and studied. The first view is that of technological evolution as a process of combinatorial innovation. Recently a simple mathematical model (TAP) was introduced to study such a…
All living systems -- from the origin of life to modern cells -- rely on a set of biochemical reactions that are simultaneously self-sustaining and autocatalytic. This notion of an autocatalytic set has been formalized graph-theoretically…
Autocatalytic sets are sets of entities that mutually catalyse each other's production through chemical reactions from a basic food source. Recently, the reflexively autocatalytic and food generated theory has introduced a formal definition…
Autocatalytic Sets are reaction networks theorised as networks at the basis of life. Their main feature is the ability of spontaneously emerging and self-reproducing. The Reflexively and Food-generated theory provides a formal definition of…
Autocatalytic sets are self-catalyzing and self-sustaining chemical reaction networks that are believed to have played an important role in the origin of life. They have been studied extensively both theoretically as well as experimentally.…
The emergence of autocatalytic sets of molecules seems to have played an important role in the origin of life context. Although the possibility to reproduce this emergence in laboratory has received considerable attention, this is still far…
The emergence of self-sustaining autocatalytic networks in chemical reaction systems has been studied as a possible mechanism for modelling how living systems first arose. It has been known for several decades that such networks will form…
In previous work, RAF theory has been developed as a tool for making theoretical progress on the origin of life question, providing insight into the structure and occurrence of self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic sets within…
Background: The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. However, the likelihood of autocatalytic sets emerging spontaneously has long been debated. Recently, progress has been made along two…
We determine conditions under which a random biochemical system is likely to contain a subsystem that is both autocatalytic and able to survive on some ambient `food' source. Such systems have previously been investigated for their…
The dominant paradigm in origin of life research is that of an RNA world. However, despite experimental progress towards the spontaneous formation of RNA, the RNA world hypothesis still has its problems. Here, we introduce a novel…
Given any finite and closed chemical reaction system, it is possible to efficiently determine whether or not it contains a `self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic' subset of reactions, and to find such subsets when they exist.…
A universal feature of the biochemistry of any living system is that all the molecules and catalysts that are required for reactions of the system can be built up from an available food source by repeated application of reactions from…
The concept of (auto)catalytic systems has become a cornerstone in understanding evolutionary processes in various fields. The common ground is the observation that for the production of new species/goods/ideas/elements etc. the…
The emergence of an autocatalytic network from an available set of elements is a fundamental step in early evolutionary processes, such as the origin of metabolism. Given a set of elements, the reactions between them (chemical or…
Autocatalysis lies at the heart of many (bio)chemical processes and is key to processes leading up to the origin of life. Two seemingly very different formalisms have emerged that define autocatalysis. Kauffman introduced collective…
Autocatalytic systems are very often incorporated in the "origin of life" models, a connection that has been analyzed in the context of the classical hypercycles introduced by Manfred Eigen. We investigate the dynamics of certain networks…
This paper presents new results from a detailed study of the structure of autocatalytic sets. We show how autocatalytic sets can be decomposed into smaller autocatalytic subsets, and how these subsets can be identified and classified. We…
Autocatalysis is a deceptively simple concept, referring to the situation that a chemical species $X$ catalyzes its own formation. From the perspective of chemical kinetics, autocatalysts show a regime of super-linear growth. Given a…