Related papers: Evolution of autocatalytic sets in a competitive p…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Selection among autocatalytic species fundamentally depends on their growth law: exponential species, whose number of copies grows exponentially, are mutually exclusive, while sub-exponential ones, whose number of copies grows polynomially,…
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…
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…
Critical, or scale independent, systems are so ubiquitous, that gaining theoretical insights on their nature and properties has many direct repercussions in social and natural sciences. In this report, we start from the simplest possible…
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…
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 thought to have played an important role in the earliest stages of the origin of life. An autocatalytic cycle (AC) is a set of reactions that results in stoichiometric increase in its constituent chemicals. When the…
In this thesis we present a mathematical model describing the population dynamics of molecules in an artificial chemistry where large molecules can be produced by successive ligation of pairs of smaller molecules. The chemistry contains a…
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…
We consider growing open chemical reaction systems (CRSs), in which autocatalytic chemical reactions are encapsulated in a finite volume and its size can change in conjunction with the reactions. The thermodynamics of growing CRSs is…
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…
We delve into growing open chemical reaction systems (CRSs) characterized by autocatalytic reactions within a variable volume, which changes in response to these reactions. Understanding the thermodynamics of such systems is crucial for…
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…
The goal of this work is to analyze a model for the rate-independent evolution of sets with finite perimeter. The evolution of the admissible sets is driven by that of a given time-dependent set, which has to include the admissible sets and…
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…
Random graph models with limited choice have been studied extensively with the goal of understanding the mechanism of the emergence of the giant component. One of the standard models are the Achlioptas random graph processes on a fixed set…