Related papers: Support for Eschenmoser's Glyoxylate Scenario
Motile microorganisms, like bacteria and algae, unify abilities like self-propulsion, autonomous navigation, and decision-making on the micron scale. While recent breakthroughs have led to the creation of synthetic microswimmers and…
Living organisms rely on molecular networks, such as gene circuits and signaling pathways, for information processing and robust decision-making in crowded, noisy environments. Recent advances show that interacting biomolecules…
It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…
The onset of life is often framed around membrane bound compartments and encoded metabolism, leaving unresolved how spatial organization arose before stable boundaries. In this context, environmental gradients are usually treated as…
Casimir-Lifshitz forces generate an unavoidable, long-range attraction between protocells under prebiotically realistic conditions. This interaction stabilizes mesoscale clusters such as tetrahedra, octahedra, and 13-cell icosahedra. These…
Living systems contain intricate biochemical networks whose structure is closely related to their function and allows them to exhibit robust behavior in the presence of external stimuli. Such networks typically involve catalytic enzymes,…
Chemical synthesis remains a critical bottleneck in the discovery and manufacture of functional small molecules. AI-based synthesis planning models could be a potential remedy to find effective syntheses, and have made progress in recent…
The recent surge in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced exciting possibilities for computational chemistry. Generative AI methods have made significant progress in sampling molecular structures across chemical species,…
The application of generative models for experimental drug discovery campaigns is severely limited by the difficulty of designing molecules de novo that can be synthesized in practice. Previous works have leveraged Generative Flow Networks…
Discovering new materials better suited to specific purposes is an important issue in improving the quality of human life. Here, a neural network that creates molecules that meet some desired conditions based on a deep understanding of…
For prebiotic chemistry to succeed in producing a starting metastable, autocatalytic and reproducing system subject to evolutionary selection it must satisfy at least two apparently contradictory requirements: Because such systems are rare,…
The unique ability of chaotic advection under micro-scale confinement to direct chemical processes along accelerated kinetic pathways has long been recognized. But practical applications have been slow to emerge because optimal results are…
Phylogenetic methods, traditionally used in biology to trace the evolutionary relationships among species, are emerging as a powerful framework to reconstruct evolutionary processes in galaxies from chemical information. We apply galactic…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
The vast amount of biological knowledge accumulated over the years has allowed researchers to identify various biochemical interactions and define different families of pathways. There is an increased interest in identifying pathways and…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
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…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
Exploring large chemical reaction networks with automated exploration approaches and accurate quantum chemical methods can require prohibitively large computational resources. Here, we present an automated exploration approach that focuses…
Variational methods offer a highly promising route to exploiting quantum computers for chemistry tasks. Here we employ methods described in a sister paper to the present report, entitled ab initio machine synthesis of quantum circuits, in…