© ISTOCK.COM/DANLEAP
Life is a self-sustaining network of chemical reactions. A living system produces its own components from basic food sources in such a way that these components maintain and regulate the very chemical network that produced them. Based on this notion of life, several models of minimal living systems were developed during the 1970s. While these models captured an essential aspect of the organization of living things, however, they could not directly explain how such systems emerged from a primordial soup of basic chemicals.
Over the past several years, one of these early models—that of autocatalytic sets—has been explored in more detail, both mathematically and with computer simulations. Autocatalytic sets are self-sustaining networks of chemical reactions that create and are catalyzed by components of the system ...
