Varetto L
Centre for Protein Engineering, Université de Liège, Belgium.
J Theor Biol. 1998 Jul 27;193(2):257-85. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.1998.0698.
In a previous paper, we proposed a molecular automaton which was an attempt to implement the "molecular logic of the living state" in an artificial biochemistry. This automaton is an artificial genetic system composed of two classes of interacting molecules, the informants and the transformers. In the present paper, we show that such a tangled hierarchy is susceptible to give rise to general hypercycles we called tanglecycles. These tanglecycles are shown to be self-reproducing autocatalytic metabolisms. They can be considered as genuine "acellular beings" in which the information is conserved in a dynamical loop. Our phenomenological study of tanglecycles reveals the emergence of properties usually associated with life, including self-reproduction, selection and chaos. In the field of the autocatalytic networks it represents a new approach in studying the self-organization of the matter with a prebiotic point of view.
在之前的一篇论文中，我们提出了一种分子自动机，它试图在人工生物化学中实现“生命状态的分子逻辑”。这种自动机是一个由两类相互作用分子组成的人工遗传系统，即信息分子和转化分子。在本文中，我们表明这样一种纠结的层次结构易于产生我们所称的缠结循环的一般超循环。这些缠结循环被证明是自我复制的自催化代谢。它们可以被视为真正的“非细胞生物”，其中信息在动态循环中得以保存。我们对缠结循环的现象学研究揭示了通常与生命相关的特性的出现，包括自我复制、选择和混沌。在自催化网络领域，它代表了一种从益生元角度研究物质自组织的新方法。
