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All life, including cells and artificial protocells, must integrate diverse molecules into a single unit in order to reproduce. Despite expected pressure to evolve a simple system with the fastest replication ...
A central unsolved problem in early evolution concerns self-organization towards higher complexity in chemical reaction networks. In theory, autocatalytic sets have useful properties to help model such transit...
Biological structures grow spontaneously from a seed, using materials supplied by the environment. These structures are hierarchical, with the ‘building blocks’ on each level constructed from those on the lowe...
Vitalism was abandoned already for a long time ago, yet the impression that animate beings differ in some fundamental way from inanimate objects continues to thrive. Here, we argue that scale free patterns, fo...
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 ...
Fatty acid vesicles are an important part of protocell models currently studied. As protocells can be considered as pre-biological precursors of cells, the models try to contribute to a better understanding of...
The concept of an autocatalytic set of molecules has been posited theoretically and demonstrated empirically with catalytic RNA molecules. For this concept to have significance in a realistic origins-of-life s...
The conceptual divide separating the physical and biological sciences continues to challenge modern science. In this perspective it is proposed that the two sciences can be directly connected through the funda...
In previous work, RAF theory has been developed as a tool for making theoretical progress on the origin of life question, providing insight into the structure and occurrence of self-sustaining and collectively...
Multidisciplinary consensus indicates that half of the genetically amino acids are likely to have been available on the prebiotic earth, which implies certain adaptive expectations for the relationship between...
Modeling molecules as undirected graphs and chemical reactions as graph rewriting operations is a natural and convenient approach to modeling chemistry. Graph grammar rules are most naturally employed to model...
The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. However, the likelihood of autocatalytic sets emerging spontaneously has long been debated. Recently, progress has be...
The assessment of molecular similarity is a key step in the drug discovery process that has thus far relied almost exclusively on computational approaches. We now report an experimental method for similarity a...
The hypercycle is a system of replicators, whose members are auto- and cross-catalytic: replication of each member is catalyzed by at least one other member of the system. Therefore, the kinetics of growth of ...
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, o...
Many biological systems contain complex precipitation patterns. These structures are considered to be the result of finely tuned and genetically encoded developmental pathways. The amount of encoded informatio...
Any living organism can be considered as a component of a dissipative process coupling an irreversible consumption of energy to the growth, reproduction and evolution of living things. Close interactions betwe...
The first RNA World models were based on the concept of an RNA replicase - a ribozyme that was a good enough RNA polymerase that it could catalyze its own replication. Although several RNA polymerase ribozymes...
A classical problem in metabolic design is to maximize the production of a desired compound in a given chemical reaction network by appropriately directing the mass flow through the network. Computationally, t...
While studying fatty acid vesicles as model primitive cell membranes, we encountered a dramatic phenomenon in which light triggers the sudden rupture of micron-scale dye-containing vesicles, resulting in rapid...
One of the remaining questions in the understanding of the origin of Nature's information system is the way the first nucleic acids have been synthesized. This could have been realized using nucleoside triphos...
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 addres...
Though Darwinian theory dramatically revolutionized biological understanding, its strictly biological focus has resulted in a widening conceptual gulf between the biological and physical sciences. In this pape...
The programmability and replicability of RNA and DNA have respectively enabled the design and selection of a number of allosteric ribozymes and deoxyribozymes. These catalysts have been adapted to function as ...
Molecular recognition at the environment provided by the phospholipid bilayer interface plays an important role in biology and is subject of intense investigation. Dynamic combinatorial chemistry is a powerful...
The mathematical form of the energy-entropy relationship is that of the relationship between the difference and the ratio of any two 'entities' x and y creating a geometrical 3D projection x = y·z, i.e., a surfac...
A self-replicating system based on a cycloaddition of a fulvene derivative and a maleinimide is investigated using a two-pronged approach combining NMR spectroscopy with computer simulations. In the course of ...
The "RNA World" hypothesis suggests that an early form of life on Earth was based on nucleic acid strands able to store genetic information and catalyze a wide range of reactions including those which lead to ...
Recent reports about enantioselective organoautocatalytic systems, in which small organic molecules assist in their own formation and under conservation of their absolute configuration, are discussed. This pro...
In earlier studies, we showed that certain low-molecular-weight carboxylic acids (profens, amino acids, hydroxy acids) can undergo spontaneous in vitro chiral conversion accompanied by condensation to from oligom...
We describe the stepwise construction of an 8-component self-sorted system (1 - 8) by the sequential addition of components. This process occurs via a large number of states (28 = 256) and even a larger number of...
The origin of homochirality of organic compounds such as L-amino acids and D-sugars have intrigued many scientists, and several hypotheses regarding its homochirality have been proposed. According to the stati...
The metabolic architectures of extant organisms share many key pathways such as the citric acid cycle, glycolysis, or the biosynthesis of most amino acids. Several competing hypotheses for the evolutionary mec...
Today most chemists think that the answer to how life on earth emerged is still unknown. They assume a gap between chemistry and biology that is still unbridged. For chemists, understanding the origin of life ...
When the free energy of similar but distinct molecule-sized objects is plotted against the temperature at which their energy and entropy contributions cancel, a highly significant linear dependence results fro...
It is our utmost pleasure to launch the Journal of Systems Chemistry. What systems chemistry exactly is will be known in a few years from now when one is able to sketch the scope and vision of the field also b...
