Related papers: Minimal autocatalytic networks
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…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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.…
Background: Autocatalytic sets are often considered a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the origin and early evolution of life. Although the idea of autocatalytic sets was already conceived of many years ago, only recently have…
Autocatalysis is an important feature of metabolic networks, contributing crucially to the self-maintenance of organisms. Autocatalytic subsystems of chemical reaction networks (CRNs) are characterized in terms of algebraic conditions on…
The persistence conjecture is a long-standing open problem in chemical reaction network theory. It concerns the behavior of solutions to coupled ODE systems that arise from applying mass-action kinetics to a network of chemical reactions.…
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…
The ability of a chemical reaction network to generate itself by catalyzed reactions from constantly present environmental food sources is considered a fundamental property in origin-of-life research. Based on Kaufmann's autocatalytic sets,…
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…
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…
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…
We define catalytic networks as chemical reaction networks with an essentially catalytic reaction pathway: one which is on in the presence of certain catalysts and off in their absence. We show that examples of catalytic networks include…