Under the conditions used to prepare the traditional sugar syrups and caramels, commercial sucrose is heated with small amounts of water in order to attain supersaturated (at room temperature) solutions. Undesuch conditions, a lag phase in sucrose thermal degradation was experimentally observed. This lag phase was also observed in the formation of reaction products, and can be interpreted has a...

The origin of life is one of the most fundamental, but also one of the most difficult problems in science. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one common element seems to be the emergence of an autocatalytic set or cycle at some stage. However, there is still disagreement as to how likely it is that such self-sustaining sets could arise “spontaneously”. This disagreement is ...

While structures and reactivities of many small molecules can be computed efficiently and accurately using quantum chemical methods, heuristic approaches remain essential for modeling complex structures and large-scale chemical systems. Here, we present a heuristics-aided quantum chemical methodology applicable to complex chemical reaction networks such as those arising in cell metabolism and p...

This work presents a new clock reaction based on ozone, iodine, and chlorate that differs from the known chlorate-iodine clock reaction because it does not require UV light. The induction period for this new clock reaction depends inversely on the initial concentrations of ozone, chlorate, and perchloric acid but is independent of the initial iodine concentration. The proposed mechanism conside...

The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. Neither is the idea that autocatalytic sets can tell us something about the evolution and functional organization of living systems. However, most of these ideas have, until recently, remained at a conceptual level, and very few concrete, mathematically sound, and practically applicable results had been ...

We investigate the role of backward reactions in a stochastic model of catalytic reaction network, with specific regard to the influence on the emergence of autocatalytic sets (ACSs), which are supposed to be one of the pre-requisites in the transition between non-living to living matter. In particular, we analyse the impact that a variation in the kinetic rates of forward and backward reaction...

In a recent work, a new regulator of the output of a continuous autocatalytic bioprocess, by means of recirculation loop, has been presented. It was shown that controlling the recirculation flow rate allows the stabilization of the output in presence of an uncontrolled input flow rate. In the present paper, we extend this result when the input substrate concentration is unknown. For this purpos...