Related papers: Random autocatalytic networks
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…
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…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
The persistence conjecture is a long-standing open problem in chemical reaction network theory. It concerns the behavior of solutions to coupled ODE systems that arise from applying mass-action kinetics to a network of chemical reactions.…
We study a family of networks of autocatalytic reactions, which we call hyperchains, that are a generalization of hypercycles. Hyperchains, and the associated dynamical system called replicator equations, are a possible mechanism for…
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…
The concept of (auto)catalytic systems has become a cornerstone in understanding evolutionary processes in various fields. The common ground is the observation that for the production of new species/goods/ideas/elements etc. the…
Self-replicating systems based on information-coding polymers are of crucial importance in biology. They also recently emerged as a paradigm in material design on nano- and micro-scales. We present a general theoretical and numerical…
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…
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,…
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…
Autocatalytic chemical reaction networks can collectively replicate or maintain their constituents despite degradation reactions only above a certain threshold, which we refer to as the decay threshold. When the chemical network has a…
Autocatalytic chemical networks play a predominant role in a large number of natural systems such as in metabolic pathways and in ecological networks. Despite recent efforts, the precise impact of thermodynamic constraints on these networks…
Over the last years, analyses performed on a stochastic model of catalytic reaction networks have provided some indications about the reasons why wet-lab experiments hardly ever comply with the phase transition typically predicted by…
This paper develops some basic principles to study autocatalytic networks and exploit their structural properties in order to characterize their inherent fundamental limits and tradeoffs. In a dynamical system with autocatalytic structure,…
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…
Autocatalytic sets are self-catalyzing and self-sustaining chemical reaction networks that are believed to have played an important role in the origin of life. They have been studied extensively both theoretically as well as experimentally.…
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…
In this thesis we present a mathematical model describing the population dynamics of molecules in an artificial chemistry where large molecules can be produced by successive ligation of pairs of smaller molecules. The chemistry contains a…
By using the point model of reaction kinetics we have studied the stochastic properties of the lifetime of small systems controlled by autocatalytic reaction A+X -> X+X -> A+X, X -> B. Assuming that a system is living only when the number…