Related papers: A Concise and Formal Definition of RAF Sets and th…
Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks play a central role in living systems, from metabolism at the origin of life, simple RNA networks, and the modern cell, to ecology and cognition. A collectively autocatalytic network that can be…
Autocatalysis lies at the heart of many (bio)chemical processes and is key to processes leading up to the origin of life. Two seemingly very different formalisms have emerged that define autocatalysis. Kauffman introduced collective…
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…
The emergence of an autocatalytic network from an available set of elements is a fundamental step in early evolutionary processes, such as the origin of metabolism. Given a set of elements, the reactions between them (chemical or…
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…
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…
In previous work, RAF theory has been developed as a tool for making theoretical progress on the origin of life question, providing insight into the structure and occurrence of self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic sets within…
A universal feature of the biochemistry of any living system is that all the molecules and catalysts that are required for reactions of the system can be built up from an available food source by repeated application of reactions from…
Two alternative views of an economy are combined and studied. The first view is that of technological evolution as a process of combinatorial innovation. Recently a simple mathematical model (TAP) was introduced to study such a…
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 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…
A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic. A generic theory to study such processes…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The ability of a chemical reaction network to generate itself by catalyzed reactions from constantly present environmental food sources is considered a fundamental property in origin-of-life research. Based on Kaufmann's autocatalytic sets,…
Given any finite and closed chemical reaction system, it is possible to efficiently determine whether or not it contains a `self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic' subset of reactions, and to find such subsets when they exist.…