相关论文: Robustness of compositional heredity to the growth…
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…
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…
The origin of heredity is studied as a recursive state in a replicating proto-cell consisting of many molecule species in mutually catalyzing reaction networks. Protocells divide when the number of molecules, increasing due to replication,…
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…
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…
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 determine conditions under which a random biochemical system is likely to contain a subsystem that is both autocatalytic and able to survive on some ambient `food' source. Such systems have previously been investigated for their…
Autocatalysis underlies the ability of chemical and biochemical systems to replicate. Autocatalysis was recently defined stoichiometrically for reaction networks; five types of minimal autocatalytic networks, termed autocatalytic cores were…
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…
The apparent difficulty of designing simple autocatalysts that grow exponentially in the absence of enzymes, external drives or ingenious internal mechanisms severely constrains scenarios for the emergence of evolution by natural selection…
An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…
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…
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…
One of the main goals of Artificial Life is to research the conditions for the emergence of life, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be. Artificial Chemistries are one of the most important tools for this purpose because they provide…
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…
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…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
We present a benchmark study of autonomous, chemical agents exhibiting associative learning of an environmental feature. Associative learning has been widely studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, but are most commonly…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
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…