Related papers: Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks within open…
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 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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 article characterizes certain small multistationary chemical reaction networks. We consider the set of fully open networks, those for which all chemical species participate in inflow and outflow, containing one non-flow (reversible or…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
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…
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 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…
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…