A simple computational model for the emergence of autocatalytic sets as described in (Farmer et al., 1986) is reimplemented. Results are found to generally agree with the major theme in the original work: increasing the initial polymer variety in a toy chemical soup scenario increases the likelihood that a complex autocatalytic set will suddenly bootstrap itself into existence. Quantitatively, ...

Through kinetic analysis, we demonstrate that the formation of catalyst and substrate reservoirs plays a crucial role in titanium(III)-catalyzed ketone-nitrile coupling reaction. Together with insight from previous studies, model is assembled reflects observed influence ZnCl2 Et3N byproducts as well hydrochloride additive, which employed frequently titanium(III) catalysis. We further propose fo...

DNA self-assembly is a powerful technology for controlling matter at the nanometre to micron scale, with potential applications in high-precision organisation and positioning of molecular components. However, the ability to program DNA-only self-organisation beyond the microscopic scale is currently lacking. In this paper we propose a computational method for programming spatial organisation of...

While the non-enzymatic ligation and template-directed synthesis of peptide nucleic acids (PNA) have been reported since 1995, a case of self-replication of PNA has not been achieved yet. Here, we present evidence for autocatalytic feedback in a template directed synthesis of a self-complementary hexa-PNA from two trimeric building blocks. The course of the reaction was monitored in the presenc...