Related papers: Fundamental Limits and Tradeoffs in Autocatalytic …
The notion of (auto) catalytic networks has become a cornerstone in understanding the possibility of a sudden dramatic increase of diversity in biological evolution as well as in the evolution of social and economical systems. Here we study…
Different graphical plots involving the catalytic rate with the (initial) substrate concentration exist in the enzyme kinetics literature to estimate the reaction constants. But, none of these standard plots can unambiguously distinguish…
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 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…
Open chemical reaction systems involve matter-exchange with the surroundings. As a result, species can accumulate inside a system during the course of the reaction. We study the role of network topology in governing the concentration…
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…
For dynamical systems arising from chemical reaction networks, persistence is the property that each species concentration remains positively bounded away from zero, as long as species concentrations were all positive in the beginning. We…
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 present a model of adaptive regulatory networks consisting of a simple biologically-motivated rewiring procedure coupled to an elementary stability criterion. The resulting networks exhibit a characteristic stationary heavy-tailed degree…
External flows of energy, entropy, and matter can cause sudden transitions in the stability of biological and industrial systems, fundamentally altering their dynamical function. How might we control and design these transitions in chemical…
Within a mathematical model, the metabolic process of glycolysis is studied. The general scheme of glycolysis is considered as a natural result of the biochemical evolution. By using the theory of dissipative structures, the conditions of…
Catalysis, the acceleration of product formation by a substance that is left unchanged, typically results from multiple elementary processes, including diffusion of the reactants toward the catalyst, chemical steps, and release of the…
Designing reaction pathways that maximize the production of a target compound in a given metabolic network is a fundamental problem in systems biology. In this study, we systematically explore the non-oxidative glycolysis metabolic network,…
Autonomous computations that rely on automated reaction network elucidation algorithms may pave the way to make computational catalysis on a par with experimental research in the field. Several advantages of this approach are key to…
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…
Living systems are maintained out-of-equilibrium by external driving forces. At stationarity, they exhibit emergent selection phenomena that break equilibrium symmetries and originate from the expansion of the accessible chemical space due…
Molecular machines are stochastic systems that catalyze the energetic processes keeping living cells alive and structured. Inspired by the examples of F1-ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellum, we present a minimal model of an externally…
Living systems operate in a critical dynamical regime -- between order and chaos -- where they are both resilient to perturbation, and flexible enough to evolve. To characterize such critical dynamics, the established 'structural theory' of…
Conformational changes are observed in many enzymes, but their role in catalysis is highly controversial. Here we present a theoretical model that illustrates how rigid catalysts can be fundamentally limited and how a conformational change…
Linearized catalytic reaction equations modeling e.g. the dynamics of genetic regulatory networks under the constraint that expression levels, i.e. molecular concentrations of nucleic material are positive, exhibit nontrivial dynamical…