Related papers: Multistable protocells can aid the evolution of pr…
Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…
In the present paper we propose an improvement of the Gillespie algorithm allowing us to study the time evolution of an ensemble of chemical reactions occurring in a varying volume, whose growth is directly related to the amount of some…
It has been pointed out that if an autocatalytic cycle produces primitive membrane chemicals, it can compose a self-maintaining proto cell. Moreover, it is known that a proto cell can divide itself spontaneously as it grows. An unsolved…
Microbial ecosystems are remarkably diverse, stable, and often consist of a balanced mixture of core and peripheral species. Here we propose a conceptual model exhibiting all these emergent properties in quantitative agreement with real…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
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…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
Species or population that proliferate faster than others become dominant in numbers. Catalysis allows catalytic sets within a molecular reaction network to dominate the non catalytic parts of the network by processing most of the available…
We revisit the modeling of the diauxic growth of a pure microorganism on two distinct sugars which was first described by Monod. Most available models are deterministic and make the assumption that all cells of the microbial ecosystem…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
We construct a simple model of a proto-cell that simulates a stochastic dynamics of abstract chemicals on a two-dimensional lattice. We assume that chemicals catalyze their reproduction through interaction with each other, and that between…
Bistability is considered wide-spread among bacteria and eukaryotic cells, useful e.g. for enzyme induction, bet hedging, and epigenetic switching. However, this phenomenon has mostly been described with deterministic dynamic or well-mixed…
All cells derive nutrition by absorbing some chemical and energy resources from the environment; these resources are used by the cells to reproduce the chemicals within them, which in turn leads to an increase in their volume. In this…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
We study a stochastic two-species chemical reaction system with two mechanisms. One mechanism consists of chemical interactions which govern the overall drift of species amounts in the system; the other mechanism consists of resampling,…
To study the dynamics of chemical processes, we often adopt rate equations to observe the change in chemical concentrations. However, when the number of the molecules is small, the fluctuations cannot be neglected. We often study the…
A fundamental question in biology is how cell populations evolve into different subtypes based on homogeneous processes at the single cell level. Here we show that population bimodality can emerge even when biological processes are…
Autocatalysis is thought to have played an important role in the earliest stages of the origin of life. An autocatalytic cycle (AC) is a set of reactions that results in stoichiometric increase in its constituent chemicals. When the…
We present a geometric framework to study the growth-division dynamics of cells and protocells, and demonstrate that self-reproduction emerges only when a system's growth dynamics and division strategy are mutually compatible. Using several…