Abstract
Protocells should be similar to present-day biological cells, but much simpler. They are believed to have played a key role in the origin of life, and they may also be the basis of a new technology with tremendous opportunities. In this work we study the effect of uneven division processes on the synchronization of the duplication rates of protocells’ membrane and internal materials.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that even in this case it is possible that not all the internal X-molecules be active in supporting the container building; however, in [19] we show that also this difference does not significantly affect the process leading to the synchronization of the X-molecules and container reproduction rates.
- 2.
The dropping of this hypothesis is one of the topics of this paper.
- 3.
This assumption is reasonable if we suppose that the flow of water is “fast” enough to allow us to consider the protocell as turgid, on the time scale of interest [20]. This implies that we do not describe here in detail the breakup of a vesicle into two, which certainly requires consideration of shape changes – that are supposed to be fast and to fall below the time scale of the relevant phenomena that the model describes. Moreover, we do not take explicitly into account osmotic effects (as for example in [21]) that might be relevant in the case of hypertonic or hypotonic environments.
- 4.
Obviously, L = 1 in case of the GMMs are diluted in the membrane.
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Musa, M., Villani, M., Serra, R. (2018). Simulating Populations of Protocells with Uneven Division. In: Pelillo, M., Poli, I., Roli, A., Serra, R., Slanzi, D., Villani, M. (eds) Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation. WIVACE 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 830. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78658-2_12
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