Filisetti, Alessandro, Alex Graudenzi, Roberto Serra, Marco Villani, Davide De Lucrezia, and Irene Poli. “The role of energy in a stochastic model of the emergence of autocatalytic sets.” In ECAL 2011-Eleventh European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems , pp. 227-234. MIT Press, 2011.
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In most theories concerning the origin of life autocatalytic sets are supposed to play an important role in the phase transition between non-living and living matter. Although several theoretical models describe this phase transition, it is very hard to recreate the experimental conditions in wet lab. We here introduce a stochastic model of catalytic reaction networks with energy constraints, devoted to the study of the emergence of autocatalytic sets, in which some of the assumptions of the already existing model are relaxed in order to explore the possible reasons which make the emergence of autocatalytic cycles difficult or which make them unstable. Moreover, since living systems operate with a continuous exchange of matter and energy with the environment, we investigate the effects on the model behavior of changes in the rate of the energy intake.