Related papers: Kinetic Origin of Heredity in a Replicating System…
A protocell model consisting of mutually catalyzing molecules is studied in order to investigate how chemical compositions are transferred recursively through cell divisions under replication errors. Depending on the path rate, the numbers…
As the first step in an investigation of the origin of genetic information, we study how some species of molecules are preserved over cell generations and play an important role in controlling the growth of a cell. We consider a model…
For understanding the origin of life, it is essential to explain the development of a compartmentalized structure, which undergoes growth and division, from a set of chemical reactions. In this study, a hypercycle with two chemicals that…
To unveil the logic of cell from a level of chemical reaction dynamics, we need to clarify how ensemble of chemicals can autonomously produce the set of chemical, without assuming a specific external control echanism. A cell consists of a…
A great variety of molecular components is encapsulated in cells. Each of these components is replicated for cell reproduction. To address an essential role of the huge diversity of cellular components, we study a model of protocells that…
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…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
In higher organisms, all cells share the same genome, but every cell expresses only a limited and specific set of genes that defines the cell type. During cell division, not only the genome, but also the cell type is inherited by the…
The cell cycle duration is a variable cellular phenotype that underlies long-term population growth and age structures. By analyzing the stationary solutions of a branching process with heritable cell division times, we demonstrate…
All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication speed, the mechanism by which…
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…
Explanation of exponential growth in self-reproduction is an important step toward elucidation of the origins of life because optimization of the growth potential across rounds of selection is necessary for Darwinian evolution. To produce…
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…
Dynamics maintaining diversity of cell types in a multi-cellular system are studied in relationship with the plasticity of cellular states. By adopting a simple theoretical framework for intra-cellular chemical reaction dynamics with…
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…
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 reproduction of a living cell requires a repeatable set of chemical events to be properly coordinated. Such events define a replication cycle, coupling the growth and shape change of the cell membrane with internal metabolic reactions.…
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…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Long ago, life obtained nucleotides in the course of evolution and became a vehicle for them. Before assembly with nucleotides, in the pre-RNA era, what system dominated heredity? What was the subject of survival competition? Is it still a…