Self-organization of primitive metabolic cycles due to non-reciprocal interactions

Abstract

We study analytically and numerically a model metabolic cycle composed of an arbitrary number of species of catalytically active particles. Each species converts a substrate into a product, the latter being used as the substrate by the next species in the cycle. Through a combination of catalytic activity and chemotactic mobility, the active particles develop effective non-reciprocal interactions with particles belonging to neighbouring species in the cycle. We find that such model metabolic cycles are able to self-organize through a macroscopic instability, with a strong dependence on the number of species they incorporate. The parity of that number has a key influence: cycles containing an even number of species are able to minimize repulsion between their component particles by aggregating all even-numbered species in one cluster, and all odd-numbered species in another. Such a grouping is not possible if the cycle contains an odd number of species, which can lead to oscillatory steady states in the case of chasing interactions.

References in corpus (11)

• Nonreciprocity as a generic route to traveling states
• Dynamic clustering and chemotactic collapse of self-phoretic active particles
• Active phase separation in mixtures of chemically interacting particles
• Non-reciprocity across scales in active mixtures
• Phoresis and Enhanced Diffusion Compete in Enzyme Chemotaxis
• Self-assembly of Active Colloidal Molecules with Dynamic Function
• Enhanced diffusion and chemotaxis at the nanoscale
• Non-equilibrium phase separation in mixtures of catalytically active particles: size dispersity and screening effects
• Network effects lead to self-organization in metabolic cycles of self-repelling catalysts
• Cross-diffusion induced patterns for a single-step enzymatic reaction
• Interaction-motif-based classification of self-organizing metabolic cycles

Cited by in corpus (15)

• The 2024 Motile Active Matter Roadmap
• Escaping kinetic traps using non-reciprocal interactions
• Network effects lead to self-organization in metabolic cycles of self-repelling catalysts
• Phase Coexistence in Nonreciprocal Quorum-Sensing Active Matter
• Enhanced stability and chaotic condensates in multi-species non-reciprocal mixtures
• Interaction-motif-based classification of self-organizing metabolic cycles
• Non-equilibrium coexistence between a fluid and a hotter or colder crystal of granular hard disks
• Mechanistic rules for de novo design of enzymes
• Self-organization of active colloids mediated by chemical interactions
• Continuous-time multifarious systems -- Part II: non-reciprocal multifarious self-organization
• Anti-aligning Self-propelled Model of Two Species: Emergence of Self-organized Heterogeneous Aligned and Clustered Order
• Conservation laws and slow dynamics determine the universality class of interfaces in active matter
• Kinetic Random-Field Nonreciprocal Ising Model
• State Diagram of the Non-Reciprocal Cahn-Hilliard Model and the Effects of Symmetry
• Non-reciprocal interactions between condensates in chemically active mixtures