De las redes de reacciones al surgimiento del metabolismo.

Abstract

Living systems are instances of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures. Several theories about their origin have been proposed, but they are hard to test empirically. One promising strategy is to search the minimal biosynthetic core common to the most ancestral unicellular organisms (e.g. acetogenic bacteria and methanogenic archaea), and to test whether the chemical species from the core are present in candidate scenarios for the origin of life, and whether the reactions are thermodynamically favorable, autocatalytic, dynamically stable, etc. Chemical Organization Theory, a mathematical framework which allow us to represent and compute the set of all possible observable configurations from a given reaction network, can be used to test hypotheses in silico about molecular self-organization prior to the first metabolic network withing a living system. In order to do this, the theory will be introduced, and a thermodynamically favorable biosynthetic network will be analyzed with Chemical Organization Theory’ tools. Organizations containing the inflow species from the biosynthetic core (H2,CO2,NH3,Pi ,H2O, and H2S) plus formate, FeS clusters, bicarbonate, CO, and H + were found. Hydrothermal Alkaline Vents, a strong candidate for the origin of life, contains the set of species found in the chemical organizations obtained from this work. The stoichiometric and dynamical properties of those sub-networks merit further exploration.