Template-Based Catalysis and the Emergence of Collectively Autocatalytic Systems

Mathematical and computational models, which have been successfully used in various fields of biology, are particularly relevant in studies on the origin of life, where wet experiments have not yet been able to obtain fully "living" entities from abiotic materials. This paper investigates mathematical and computational models of interacting polymers in prebiotic environments to understand how molecular replication and protocell reproduction could emerge. This study builds on the Binary Polymer Model (K-BPM), in which polymers are represented as binary strings that undergo catalyzed condensation and cleavage reactions, by introducing a biologically relevant variant (C-BPM), where catalytic activity depends on polymer structure. The model is analyzed with respect to the formation of autocatalytic networks, formalized as Reflexive Autocatalytic Food-generated (RAF) sets, embedded in a protocell in order to simulate their dynamics. The results show clear differences between K-BPM and C-BPM models. They also show that the existence of a RAF does not guarantee the survival of a population of protocells, although it may be possible when only a subset of the existing species partakes in the RAF, thus suggesting that small autocatalytic networks may have preceded the larger networks found in modern life.