ArticleThe Journal of biological chemistry2018
Mathematical modeling reveals spontaneous emergence of self-replication in chemical reaction systems.
Article in The Journal of biological chemistry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The origin and development of life in an informational dissipative perspective.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Article
- Thermodynamic consistency of autocatalytic cycles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The second wave of formose research.BBA advances · 2025Article
- Design principles, growth laws, and competition of minimal autocatalysts.Communications chemistry · 2024Article
- Theoretical perspective on synthetic man-made life: Learning from the origin of life.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2023Review
- Improving pathway prediction accuracy of constraints-based metabolic network models by treating enzymes as microcompartments.Synthetic and systems biotechnology · 2023Article
- Measurement of the neutral axis in avian eggshells reveals which species conform to the golden ratio.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2022Article
- On the Origin of Sugar Handedness: Facts, Hypotheses and Missing Links-A Review.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2022Review
- The hierarchical organization of autocatalytic reaction networks and its relevance to the origin of life.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Ladderpath Approach: How Tinkering and Reuse Increase Complexity and Information.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- An ecological framework for the analysis of prebiotic chemical reaction networks.Journal of theoretical biology · 2020Article
- On the definition of a self-sustaining chemical reaction system and its role in heredity.Biology direct · 2020Article
- The structure of autocatalytic networks, with application to early biochemistry.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Explaining the origin of life requires us to elucidate how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously proposed mathematical models either supply an explicit framework for a minimal living system or consider only catalyzed reactions, and thus fail to provide a comprehensive theory. Here, we set up a general mathematical model for chemical reaction systems that properly accounts for energetics, kinetics, and the conservation law. We found that 1) some systems are collectively catalytic, a mode whereby reactants are transformed into end products with the assistance of intermediates (as in the citric acid cycle), whereas some others are self-replicating, that is, different parts replicate each other and the system self-replicates as a whole (as in the formose reaction, in which sugar is replicated from formaldehyde); 2) side reactions do not always inhibit such systems; 3) randomly chosen chemical universes (namely random artificial chemistries) often contain one or more such systems; 4) it is possible to construct a self-replicating system in which the entropy of some parts spontaneously decreases, in a manner similar to that discussed by Schrödinger; and 5) complex self-replicating molecules can emerge spontaneously and relatively easily from simple chemical reaction systems through a sequence of transitions. Together, these results start to explain the origins of prebiotic evolution.
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