Alessandro Filisetti, Alex Graudenzi, Roberto Serra, Marco Villani, Davide De Lucrezia, Rudolf Marcel Füchslin, Stuart Kauffman, Norman H. Packard, Irene Poli
AbstractBackgroundThe 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 scenario, it will be important to demonstrate the evolvability of suc...... hiện toàn bộ
Vittorio Saggiomo, Yana R. Hristova, R. Frederick Ludlow, Sijbren Otto
AbstractBackgroundThe 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 assessment based on dynamic combinatorial chemistry.
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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 (cellular) origin of life and emphasize on 2 major aspects: compartmentalization and replication. It has been demonstrated that lipid-based membranes are amenable to growth and division ...... hiện toàn bộ
Jakob L Andersen, Christoph Flamm, Daniel Merkle, Peter F Stadler
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 elementary reactions like merging, splitting, and isomerisation of molecules. It is often convenient, in particular in the analysis of larger systems, to summarize several subsequent reactio...... hiện toàn bộ
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, found throughout nature, present convincing evidence that this demarcation is only imaginary. Therefore, all systems ought to be regarded alike, i.e., all are consuming free energy in least tim...... hiện toàn bộ
Grace Eckhoff, Vlad Codrea, Andrew D Ellington, Xi Chen
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 signal transducers in biosensors and biochemical reaction networks both in vitro and in vivo. However, allosteric control of nucleic acid catalysts is currently limited by the fact that one m...... hiện toàn bộ
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 surface of the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid being a particular form of a quadric. The significance of this relationship is discussed here in a realm beyond thermodynamics. Somewhat intuitive...... hiện toàn bộ
Olga Taran, Oliver Thoennessen, Karin Achilles, Günter von Kiedrowski
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 self-replication. For this hypothesis to be true there must exist an efficient process for creating RNA or RNA-like polymers of mixed sequences from short precursors, where these polymers hav...... hiện toàn bộ