Departamento de Biología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 653, Santiago, Chile.
J Theor Biol. 2011 Oct 7;286(1):100-13. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.06.033. Epub 2011 Jul 12.
The nature of life has been a topic of interest from the earliest of times, and efforts to explain it in mechanistic terms date at least from the 18th century. However, the impressive development of molecular biology since the 1950s has tended to have the question put on one side while biologists explore mechanisms in greater and greater detail, with the result that studies of life as such have been confined to a rather small group of researchers who have ignored one another's work almost completely, often using quite different terminology to present very similar ideas. Central among these ideas is that of closure, which implies that all of the catalysts needed for an organism to stay alive must be produced by the organism itself, relying on nothing apart from food (and hence chemical energy) from outside. The theories that embody this idea to a greater or less degree are known by a variety of names, including (M,R) systems, autopoiesis, the chemoton, the hypercycle, symbiosis, autocatalytic sets, sysers and RAF sets. These are not all the same, but they are not completely different either, and in this review we examine their similarities and differences, with the aim of working towards the formulation of a unified theory of life.
生命的本质一直是人们感兴趣的话题，至少从 18 世纪开始，人们就试图用机械论的术语来解释它。然而，自 20 世纪 50 年代以来，分子生物学的惊人发展往往使人们把这个问题放在一边，而生物学家则越来越详细地探索机制，结果是，对生命本身的研究仅限于一小部分研究人员，他们几乎完全忽略了彼此的工作，经常使用非常不同的术语来表达非常相似的想法。其中核心的一个想法是封闭性，它意味着生物体保持生命所需的所有催化剂都必须由生物体自身产生，除了来自外部的食物（因此是化学能）之外，不依赖任何其他东西。在不同程度上体现这一思想的理论有多种名称，包括（M,R）系统、自创生、化学元、超循环、共生、自催化集、系统和 RAF 集。这些名称并不完全相同，但也不完全不同，在这篇综述中，我们研究了它们的相似性和不同之处，旨在努力形成一个统一的生命理论。
