Related papers: Spatial Structure Supports Diversity in Prebiotic …
It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…
Biological cells with all of their surface structure and complex interior stripped away are essentially vesicles - membranes composed of lipid bilayers which form closed sacs. Vesicles are thought to be relevant as models of primitive…
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…
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…
Early theoretical work revealed that the simplest class of autocatalytic cycles, known as hypercycles, provide an elegant framework for understanding the evolution of mutualism. Furthermore, hypercycles are highly susceptible to parasites,…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
Assembly theory predicts that a distinguishing signature of life is its ability to produce complex molecules in abundance, opening new possibilities for life detection. Experimental validation of this approach has so far relied on abiotic…
We study evolutionary processes induced by spatio-temporal dynamics in prebiotic evolution. Using numerical simulations we demonstrate that hypercycles emerge from complex interaction structures in multispecies systems. In this work we also…
The evolution of autocatalytic sets (ACS) is a widespread process in biological, chemical and ecological systems which is of great significance in many applications, such as the evolution of new species or complex chemical organizations. In…
Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is known to…
The emergence of autocatalytic sets of molecules seems to have played an important role in the origin of life context. Although the possibility to reproduce this emergence in laboratory has received considerable attention, this is still far…
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,…
Gradual changes in exploitation, nutrient loading, etc. produce shifts between alternative stable states (ASS) in ecosystems which, quite often, are not smooth but abrupt or catastrophic. Early warnings of such catastrophic regime shifts…
An important transition after the origin of life was the first emergence of a Darwinian population, self-reproducing entities exhibiting differential reproduction, phenotypic variation, and inheritance of phenotypic traits. The simplest…
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…
The role of asymmetry on the evolution of prebiotic homochirality is investigated in the context of autocatalytic polymerization reaction networks. A model featuring enantiometric cross-inhibition and chiral bias is used to study the…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
The spatial structure of the cell is highly organized at all levels: from small complexes and assemblies, to local nano- and micro-clusters, to global, micrometer scales across and between cells. We suggest that this multiscale spatial cell…
Autocatalytic processes underlie diverse systems in which replication is triggered at interfaces, including heterogeneous catalysis on solid substrates, enzyme activity at membranes, viral infections, biofilm growth, and spatially…
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…