Related papers: Optimal size for emergence of self-replicating pol…
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…
Self-replicating systems based on information-coding polymers are of crucial importance in biology. They also recently emerged as a paradigm in material design on nano- and micro-scales. We present a general theoretical and numerical…
Self-assembling, semi-flexible polymers are ubiquitous in biology and technology. However, there remain conflicting accounts of the equilibrium kinetics for such an important system. Here, by focusing on a dynamical description of a minimal…
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 develop a formal model of the emergence of self-constructing objects (e.g. heteropolymers with autocatalytic capability) in an open system, which don't contain such objects initially. The objects are constructed from subunits (e.g.…
Emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences is a major question in the study of origins of life. To answer this, we studied a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types…
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…
A living polymers transition is found in molecular dynamics simulations of a charge-symmetric size-asymmetric electrolyte with no anisotropic interactions. The fluid has strong polymeric character at low temperatures, where it consists of…
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…
In this paper, we investigate a stochastic model describing the time evolution of a polymerization process. A polymer is a macro-molecule resulting from the aggregation of several elementary sub-units called monomers. Polymers can grow by…
Polymer models are a widely used tool to study the prebiotic formation of metabolism at the origins of life. Counts of the number of reactions in these models are often crucial in probabilistic arguments concerning the emergence of…
By using the point model of reaction kinetics we have studied the stochastic properties of the lifetime of small systems controlled by autocatalytic reaction A+X -> X+X -> A+X, X -> B. Assuming that a system is living only when the number…
The selection of an equilibrium state by maximising the entropy of a system, subject to certain constraints, is often powerfully motivated as an exercise in logical inference, a procedure where conclusions are reached on the basis of…
We study a stochastic model of a copolymerization process that has been extensively investigated in the physics literature. The main questions of interest include: (i) what are the criteria for transience, null recurrence, and positive…
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.…
The aim of this paper is twofold: - To give an elementary and self-contained proof of an explicit formula for the free energy for a general class of polymer chains interacting with an environment through periodic potentials. This…
In this chapter we review the rich behavior of polymer chains embedded in a quenched random environment. We first consider the problem of a Gaussian chain free to move in a random potential with short-ranged correlations. We derive the…
Autocatalytic reaction system with a small number of molecules is studied numerically by stochastic particle simulations. A novel state due to fluctuation and discreteness in molecular numbers is found, characterized as extinction of…
In the present work, crystallization in melts and poor-solvent solutions of semiflexible polymers with different concentration was studied by means of dissipative particle dynamics simulation technique. We use a coarse-grained polymer model…