Abstract. All living systems – from the origin of life to modern cells – rely on a set of biochemical reactions that are simultaneously self-sustaining and autocatalytic. This notion of an autocatalytic set has been formalized graph-theoretically (as ‘RAF’), leading to mathematical results and polynomialtime algorithms that have been applied to simulated and real chemical reaction systems. In t...

Autopoietic systems, chemotons, and autogens are models that aim to explain (the emergence of) life as a functionally closed and self-sustaining system. An essential element in these models is the notion of a boundary containing, maintaining, and being generated by an internal reaction network. The more general concept of collectively autocatalytic sets, formalized as RAF theory, does not expli...

Theoretical investigations of autocatalytic sets rendered the occurrence of self-sustaining sets of molecules to be a generic property of random reaction networks. This stands in some contrast to the experimental difficulty to actually find such systems. In this work, we argue that the usual approach, which is based on the study of static properties of reaction graphs has to be complemented wit...

Objective: Determine whether it is cost-effective to update the existing § 50.44 requirements on combustible gas control to require passive autocatalytic recombiners for all PWRs with large-dry containment buildings. Under this approach, a backfit would be required of licensees with plants that have large dry containments in that they would have to install PARs and maintain them for the duratio...

A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures – and what spontaneous processes – drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the prediction that random sequences of hydrophobic (H) and polar (P ) monomers can collapse into relatively compact structures, exposing hydrophobic surfaces, acti...

Autocatalytic cycles are rather common in biological systems and they might have played a major role in the transition from non-living to living systems. Several theoretical models have been proposed to address the experimentalists during the investigation of this issue and most of them describe a phase transition depending upon the level of heterogeneity of the chemical soup. Nevertheless, it ...