Chemical oscillations in non-isothermal chemical self-replication

Abstract

Most biological systems show a tight temperature control allowing minimal variations of the order of one to two degrees. Still, most dynamic studies of relevant natural mechanisms consider only the isothermal case. In this paper, we show that we can consider exothermicity and heat conduction in our minimal model of chemical self-replication. For reasonable physical parameter values, we obtain chemical oscillations with temperature variations ranging from 0.3% to 3%, concentration variations can be as significant as 100 %.