Background: Autocatalytic sets are often considered a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the origin and early evolution of life. Although the idea of autocatalytic sets was already conceived of many years ago, only recently have they gained more interest, following advances in creating them experimentally in the laboratory. In our own work, we have studied autocatalytic sets extensive...

Life on Earth must originally have arisen from abiotic chemistry. Since the details of this chemistry are unknown, we wish to understand, in general, which types of chemistry can lead to complex, life-like behaviour. Our recent work has shown that the inclusion of thermodynamic principles in simple artificial chemistry models can result in the selforganisation of autocatalytic cycles. In this p...

We investigate chaotic advection and diffusion in autocatalytic reactions for time-periodic sine flow computationally using a mapping method with operator splitting. We specifically consider three different autocatalytic reaction schemes: a single autocatalytic reaction, competitive autocatalytic reactions, which can provide insight into problems of chiral symmetry breaking and homochirality, a...

A new study presents a quantitative biophysical model of microtubule aster growth with autocatalytic microtubule nucleation. The model accounts for asters that grow indefinitely, even when their microtubules are unstable.

The formation of a self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical network is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the origin of life. The question of whether such a network could form "by chance" within a sufficiently complex suite of molecules and reactions is one that we have investigated for a simple chemical reaction model based on polymer ligation and cleavage. In this paper, we extend thi...

The origin of life is one of the most fundamental, but also one of the most difficult problems in science. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one common element seems to be the emergence of an autocatalytic set or cycle at some stage. However, there is still disagreement as to how likely it is that such self-sustaining sets could arise “spontaneously”. This disagreement is ...

The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. Neither is the idea that autocatalytic sets can tell us something about the evolution and functional organization of living systems. However, most of these ideas have, until recently, remained at a conceptual level, and very few concrete, mathematically sound, and practically applicable results had been ...

We investigate the role of backward reactions in a stochastic model of catalytic reaction network, with specific regard to the influence on the emergence of autocatalytic sets (ACSs), which are supposed to be one of the pre-requisites in the transition between non-living to living matter. In particular, we analyse the impact that a variation in the kinetic rates of forward and backward reaction...