Population Dynamics of Autocatalytic Sets in a Compartmentalized Spatial World
1
Institute for Advanced Study, University of Amsterdam, 1012 WX Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex BioSystems Research Group (ICOS), School of Computing, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE98, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Life 2018, 8(3), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/life8030033
Received: 26 June 2018 / Revised: 13 August 2018 / Accepted: 18 August 2018 / Published: 18 August 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Systems Protobiology: Origin of Life by Mutually Catalytic Networks)
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.
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Keywords:
protocells; origin of life; autocatalytic sets; evolvability
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
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Externally hosted supplementary file 1
Link: http://ico2s.org/data/extras/compartments/
Description: The parameter files and the movies referred to in out article.
MDPI and ACS Style
Hordijk, W.; Naylor, J.; Krasnogor, N.; Fellermann, H. Population Dynamics of Autocatalytic Sets in a Compartmentalized Spatial World. Life 2018, 8, 33.
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