Light Induced Replication and Selection in Peptide Networks

Complex-systems research has received a lot of attention in mathematics, physics, and biology, but until not too long ago was significantly underdeveloped in chemistry. Recently, it has been realized that while cell biochemistry is a natural model for studying functional networks, rationally designed self-organized synthetic networks might also provide useful models for understanding and exploitation of complex systems' behavior [1]. Thus, several relatively complex networks were studied, and it was found possible to predict and analyze their connectivity and global topology [2]. Moreover, the networks could also be manipulated in various ways to show that just like the cellular networks, their rewiring following changes in the environmental conditions is substantial, and that they can carry out chemical transformations via various complex pathways, such as the Boolean logic operations [3,4].