Title
COMBINATORICS OF POLYMER-BASED MODELS OF EARLY METABOLISM
Abstract
Polymer models are a widely used tool to study the prebiotic formation of metabolism at the origins of life. Counts of the number of reactions in these models are often crucial in prob-abilistic arguments concerning the emergence of autocatalytic networks. In the first part of this paper, we provide the first exact description of the number of reactions under widely applied model assumptions. Conclusions from earlier studies rely on either approximations or asymptotic counting, and we show that the exact counts lead to similar, though not always identical, asymptotic results. In the second part of the paper, we investigate a novel model assumption whereby polymers are invariant under spatial rotation. We outline the biochemical relevance of this condition and again give exact enumerative and asymptotic formulae for the number of reactions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1137/20M1324429
SIAM JOURNAL ON DISCRETE MATHEMATICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
binary polymer model, polymer, peptides, enumeration, Mobius inversion, origin of metabolism, autocatalytic network, RAF set
Journal
35
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
0895-4801
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oliver Weller-Davies100.34
Mike Steel227041.87
Jotun Hein377887.67