Related papers: Autocatalytic Sets Extended: Dynamics, Inhibition,…
A model of $s$ interacting species is considered with two types of dynamical variables. The fast variables are the populations of the species and slow variables the links of a directed graph that defines the catalytic interactions among…
A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic. A generic theory to study such processes…
Autocatalysis is a fundamental concept, used in a wide range of domains. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can…
Autocatalysis, the ability of a chemical system to make more of itself, is a crucial feature in metabolism and is speculated to have played a decisive role in the origin of life. Nevertheless, how autocatalytic systems behave far from…
Autocatalysis underlies the ability of chemical and biochemical systems to replicate. Recently, Blokhuis et al. gave a stoechiometric definition of autocatalysis for reaction networks, stating the existence of a combination of reactions…
Self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical networks represent a necessary, though not sufficient condition for the emergence of early living systems. These networks have been formalised and investigated within the framework of RAF theory, which…
I analyse a model of an evolving network represented as a directed graph; each node corresponds to one molecular species and the links to catalytic interactions between species. Over short timescales the graph remains fixed while relative…
Autocatalysis underlies the ability of chemical and biochemical systems to replicate. Autocatalysis was recently defined stoichiometrically for reaction networks; five types of minimal autocatalytic networks, termed autocatalytic cores were…
This paper develops some basic principles to study autocatalytic networks and exploit their structural properties in order to characterize their inherent fundamental limits and tradeoffs. In a dynamical system with autocatalytic structure,…
The existence of the {\em typical set} is key for data compression strategies and for the emergence of robust statistical observables in macroscopic physical systems. Standard approaches derive its existence from a restricted set of…
Over the last years, analyses performed on a stochastic model of catalytic reaction networks have provided some indications about the reasons why wet-lab experiments hardly ever comply with the phase transition typically predicted by…
We study a family of networks of autocatalytic reactions, which we call hyperchains, that are a generalization of hypercycles. Hyperchains, and the associated dynamical system called replicator equations, are a possible mechanism for…
Autocatalytic processes underlie diverse systems in which replication is triggered at interfaces, including heterogeneous catalysis on solid substrates, enzyme activity at membranes, viral infections, biofilm growth, and spatially…
It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…
We consider the population dynamics of a set of species whose network of catalytic interactions is described by a directed graph. The relationship between the attractors of this dynamics and the underlying graph theoretic structures like…
The apparent difficulty of designing simple autocatalysts that grow exponentially in the absence of enzymes, external drives or ingenious internal mechanisms severely constrains scenarios for the emergence of evolution by natural selection…
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…
Catalysis, the acceleration of product formation by a substance that is left unchanged, typically results from multiple elementary processes, including diffusion of the reactants toward the catalyst, chemical steps, and release of the…
The origin of life must have been preceded by Darwin-like evolutionary dynamics that could propagate it. How did that adaptive dynamics arise? And from what prebiotic molecules? Using evolutionary invasion analysis, we develop a universal…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…