ReviewLife (Basel, Switzerland)2018
Autocatalytic Networks at the Basis of Life's Origin and Organization.
Review in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- Is the emergence of life and of agency expected?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- On the emergence of metabolism: the evolution of proteins that powered life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Maximum Entropy Production Principle of Thermodynamics for the Birth and Evolution of Life.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Asymmetric autocatalytic reactions and their stationary distribution.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Origin of ribonucleotide recognition motifs through ligand mimicry at early earth.RNA biology · 2024Review
- The ecology-evolution continuum and the origin of life.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Origins of Genetic Coding: Self-Guided Molecular Self-Organisation.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Conditions for the origin of homochirality in primordial catalytic reaction networks.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Semigroup models for biochemical reaction networks.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- An algebraic characterization of self-generating chemical reaction networks using semigroup models.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Astrobiology in Space: A Comprehensive Look at the Solar System.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- The hierarchical organization of autocatalytic reaction networks and its relevance to the origin of life.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- The Origin of Life: What Is the Question?Astrobiology · 2022Article
- Thermodynamics of Potential CHO Metabolites in a Reducing Environment.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- When Is a Reaction Network a Metabolism? Criteria for Simple Metabolisms That Support Growth and Division of Protocells.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Origin of Species before Origin of Life: The Role of Speciation in Chemical Evolution.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- From inert matter to the global society life as multi-level networks of processes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The Causal Closure of Physics in Real World Contexts.Foundations of physics · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Life is more than the sum of its constituent molecules. Living systems depend on a particular chemical organization, i.e., the ways in which their constituent molecules interact and cooperate with each other through catalyzed chemical reactions. Several abstract models of minimal life, based on this idea of chemical organization and also in the context of the origin of life, were developed independently in the 1960s and 1970s. These models include hypercycles, chemotons, autopoietic systems, (M,R)-systems, and autocatalytic sets. We briefly compare these various models, and then focus more specifically on the concept of autocatalytic sets and their mathematical formalization, RAF theory. We argue that autocatalytic sets are a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for life-like behavior. We then elaborate on the suggestion that simple inorganic molecules like metals and minerals may have been the earliest catalysts in the formation of prebiotic autocatalytic sets, and how RAF theory may also be applied to systems beyond chemistry, such as ecology, economics, and cognition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.