36 citations · 178 across the 88 of their papers we have counts for
13 papers · 1 filter
Combinatorics of polymer models of early metabolism
Oliver Weller-Davies, Mike Steel, Jotun Hein
Polymer models are a widely used tool to study the prebiotic formation of metabolism at the origins of life. Counts of the number of reactions in these models are often crucial in…
The expected number of viable autocatalytic sets in chemical reaction systems
Stuart Kauffman, Mike Steel
The emergence of self-sustaining autocatalytic networks in chemical reaction systems has been studied as a possible mechanism for modelling how living systems first arose. It has b…
Combinatorial results for network-based models of metabolic origins
Oliver Weller-Davies, Mike Steel, Jotun Hein
A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collecti…
Tractable models of self-sustaining autocatalytic networks
Mike Steel, Wim Hordijk
Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks play a central role in living systems, from metabolism at the origin of life, simple RNA networks, and the modern cell, to ecology and cognit…
Autocatalytic sets in polymer networks with variable catalysis distributions
Wim Hordijk, Mike Steel
All living systems -- from the origin of life to modern cells -- rely on a set of biochemical reactions that are simultaneously self-sustaining and autocatalytic. This notion of an…
Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks within open-ended reaction systems
Mike Steel
Given any finite and closed chemical reaction system, it is possible to efficiently determine whether or not it contains a `self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic' subset o…
Autocatalytic sets in a partitioned biochemical network
Joshua I Smith, Mike Steel, Wim Hordijk
In previous work, RAF theory has been developed as a tool for making theoretical progress on the origin of life question, providing insight into the structure and occurrence of sel…
Autocatalytic Sets and Biological Specificity
Wim Hordijk, Peter R. Wills, Mike Steel
A universal feature of the biochemistry of any living system is that all the molecules and catalysts that are required for reactions of the system can be built up from an available…
Minimal autocatalytic networks
Mike Steel, Wim Hordijk, Joshua Smith
Self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical networks represent a necessary, though not sufficient condition for the emergence of early living systems. These networks have been formalise…
A formal model of autocatalytic sets emerging in an RNA replicator system
Wim Hordijk, Mike Steel
Background: The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. However, the likelihood of autocatalytic sets emerging spontaneously has lon…
Autocatalytic Sets Extended: Dynamics, Inhibition, and a Generalization
Wim Hordijk, Mike Steel
Background: Autocatalytic sets are often considered a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the origin and early evolution of life. Although the idea of autocatalytic sets w…
The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets: Evolvability, Enablement, and Emergence
Wim Hordijk, Mike Steel, Stuart Kauffman
This paper presents new results from a detailed study of the structure of autocatalytic sets. We show how autocatalytic sets can be decomposed into smaller autocatalytic subsets, a…
Random autocatalytic networks
Elchanan Mossel, Mike Steel
We determine conditions under which a random biochemical system is likely to contain a subsystem that is both autocatalytic and able to survive on some ambient `food' source. Such…