Deamer D (2005) A giant step toward artificial life? Trends Biotech 23:336–338
Dyson F (1982) A model for the origin of life. J Mol Evol 18:344–350
Eigen M, Schuster P (1979) The hypercycle: a principle of natural self-organization. Springer, Berlin
Ganti T (1975) Organization of chemical reactions into dividing and metabolizing units: the chemotons. Biosystems 7:15–21
Ganti T (2002) On the early evolutionary origin of biological periodicity. Cell Biol Int 26:729–735
Kauffman SA (1986) Autocatalytic sets of proteins. J Theor Biol 119:1–24
Luisi PL (1993) Defining the transition to life: self-replicating bounded structures and chemical autopoiesis. In: Stein W, Varela F (eds) Thinking about biology. Addison-Wesley, New York
Luisi PL, Ferri F, Stano P (2006) Approaches to semi-synthetic minimal cells: a review. Naturwissenschaften 93:1–13
Mavelli F (2003) Theoretical investigations on autopoietic replication mechanisms. Ph. D. dissertation (Nr. 15218), Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ETH-Zürich
Mavelli F, Piotto S (2006) Stochastic simulations of homogeneous chemically reacting systems. J Mol Struct 771:55–64
Mavelli F, Ruiz-Mirazo K (2007) Stochastic simulations of minimal self-reproducing cellular systems. Phil Trans Roy Soc B (in press) DOI 10.1098/rstb.2007.2071
Pohorille A, Deamer DW (2002) Artificial cells: prospects for biotechnology. Trends Biotech 2:123–128
Solé RV, Munteanu A, Rodriguez-Caso C, Macía J (2007) Synthetic protocell biology: from reproduction to computation. Phil Trans Roy Soc B (in press) DOI 10.1098/rstb.2007.2065
Varela FJ, Maturana H, Uribe R (1974) Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. Biosystems 5:187–196
Zepik HH, Bloechliger E, Luisi PL (2001) A chemical model of homeostasis. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 40:199–202