Abstract
Autocatalytic sets are self-sustaining and collectively catalytic chemical reaction networks which are believed to have played an important role in the origin of life. Simulation studies have shown that autocatalytic sets are, in principle, evolvable if multiple autocatalytic subsets can exist in different combinations within compartments, i.e., so-called protocells. However, these previous studies have so far not explicitly modeled the emergence and dynamics of autocatalytic sets in populations of compartments in a spatial environment. Here, we use a recently developed software tool to simulate exactly this scenario, as an important first step towards more realistic simulations and experiments on autocatalytic sets in protocells.
Highlights
Autocatalysis, i.e., the ability of molecules to catalyse their own synthesis, is a hallmark of virtually any origin of life scenario, since it is the chemical equivalent to biological replication—the fundamental feature of living entities to “make more of themselves”
Autocatalysis can be obtained at a systems level, if a chemistry features a set of mutually catalytic molecules in which the formation of every member is catalysed by other members of the set
We have presented results of computational simulations of autocatalytic sets emerging in compartments
Summary
Autocatalysis, i.e., the ability of molecules to catalyse their own synthesis, is a hallmark of virtually any origin of life scenario, since it is the chemical equivalent to biological replication—the fundamental feature of living entities to “make more of themselves”. Autocatalysis can be obtained at a systems level, if a chemistry features a set of mutually catalytic molecules in which the formation of every member is catalysed by other members of the set Such a set is able to collectively catalyse all its constituents, even if none of its members is a true (i.e., direct, or “selfish”) autocatalyst [1,2,3]. RAF theory has been applied extensively to simple polymer-like models of chemical reaction networks, showing that autocatalytic sets are highly likely to exist at chemically realistic levels of catalysis, and under a wide variety of model assumptions [5,26,27,29,30]. The formal RAF framework has been applied successfully to analyse real chemical and biological reaction networks [32,33]
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