Department of Chemistry, University of Bari, Via Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy.
Phys Biol. 2010 Feb 3;7(1):16010. doi: 10.1088/1478-3975/7/1/016010.
Two kinetic models describing the emergence of autopoietic chemical units are presented and discussed: the single reagent autopoietic mechanism (SRAM) and a reduced version (rSRAM). The proposed schemes are inspired to the autopoietic vesicles studied by Zepik et al (2001 Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. Engl. 40 199-202). Deterministic and stochastic analyses are then performed in order to obtain conditions for growth, homeostasis and decay time behaviours of the overall amphiphiles concentration. Only the reduced SRAM is able to exhibit all the three regimes as experimentally observed and in order to obtain details on the time evolution of the aggregates' size distribution, stochastic simulations are carried out. What emerges from the rSRAM simulation outcomes is that random fluctuations can act as selection rules for the size of the autopoietic units in the homeostatic regime suggesting how, in a prebiotic scenario, stochastic fluctuations can select the more robust, in this case larger, as the fittest 'organisms'.
单试剂自生成机制（SRAM）和简化版本（rSRAM）。所提出的方案受到 Zepik 等人研究的自生成囊泡的启发（2001 年 Angew. Chem.，Int. Ed. Engl. 40 199-202）。然后进行确定性和随机性分析，以获得整体两亲物浓度生长、稳态和衰减时间行为的条件。只有简化的 SRAM 能够表现出实验观察到的所有三种状态，并且为了获得关于聚集体大小分布的时间演化的详细信息，进行了随机模拟。从 rSRAM 模拟结果中得出的结论是，随机波动可以作为稳态中自生单元大小的选择规则，这表明在原始场景中，随机波动如何能够选择更稳健的、在这种情况下更大的、作为最合适的“生物体”。
