Title: Phase Transitions in Chemical Reaction Networks

Speaker:
Daniel Biro, Ximo Pechuan, Maryl Lambros, Dani Martinez, Jose Aguilar, Juli Pereto, & Aviv Bergman

Abstract:
The chemical reaction networks hypothesized to be operating at the dawn of life have been traditionally regarded as a highly diverse and complex chemical ecosystem. In order for a biosphere to emerge on a planet, these reaction networks have to transition from a high to a moderate complexity state in which a subset of the possible chemical flows within the system dominate. In order to study these networks, we have developed a pipeline to generate random chemical reaction networks in order to dynamically test their properties as functions of network structure. We have examined the effects of replicator dynamics, effects of modular structure, and the effects of introducing protocell-like structures to model the dynamics potentially present in the transition from abiotic to protobiotic chemistry and chemical reaction networks. We utilize these results to develop an intuition as to the structure of chemical fluxes that could give rise to biotic systemic properties such as evolution, chromosomal structure, and contained reaction networks.