Related papers: Modeling pre-biotic self-organization: The chemica…
Large molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids are crucial for life, yet their primordial origin remains a major puzzle. The production of large molecules, as we know it today, requires good catalysts, and the only good catalysts we…
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…
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…
Evolution produces complex and structured networks of interacting components in chemical, biological, and social systems. We describe a simple mathematical model for the evolution of an idealized chemical system to study how a network of…
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…
Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…
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…
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…
To study the fluctuations and dynamics in chemical reaction processes, stochastic differential equations based on the rate equation involving chemical concentrations are often adopted. When the number of molecules is very small, however,…
Compartmentalization of biochemical processes underlies all biological systems, from the organelle to the tissue scale. Theoretical models to study the interplay between noisy reaction dynamics and compartmentalization are sparse, and…
We present a simple mathematical model that captures the evolutionary capabilities of a prebiotic compartment or protocell. In the model the protocell contains an autocatalytic set whose chemical dynamics is coupled to the growth-division…
A great variety of molecular components is encapsulated in cells. Each of these components is replicated for cell reproduction. To address an essential role of the huge diversity of cellular components, we study a model of protocells that…
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…
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 evolution of autocatalytic sets (ACS) is a widespread process in biological, chemical and ecological systems which is of great significance in many applications, such as the evolution of new species or complex chemical organizations. In…
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…
Autocatalytic chemical networks play a predominant role in a large number of natural systems such as in metabolic pathways and in ecological networks. Despite recent efforts, the precise impact of thermodynamic constraints on these networks…
We study analytically and numerically a model metabolic cycle composed of an arbitrary number of species of catalytically active particles. Each species converts a substrate into a product, the latter being used as the substrate by the next…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
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…