Thermodynamic consistency of autocatalytic cycles.

ABSTRACT: Autocatalysis is seen as a potential key player in the origin of life, and perhaps more generally in the emergence of Darwinian dynamics. Building on recent formalizations of this phenomenon, we tackle the computational challenge of exhaustively detecting minimal autocatalytic cycles (autocatalytic cores) in reaction networks and further evaluate the impact of thermodynamic constraints on their realization under mass action kinetics. We first characterize the complexity of the detection problem by proving its NP-completeness. This justifies the use of constraint solvers to list all cores in a given reaction network, and also to group them into compatible sets, composed of cores whose stoichiometric requirements are not contradictory. Crucially, we show that the introduction of thermodynami

SUBMITTER: Kosc T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12067211 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature