Evolution from Proto-Life to Metabolic Networks

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First meeting scheduled for Thu, Jun 7, 10:15am after the lecture.

People

(Just sign up yourself, if interested, or, whom I've just forgotten)

• Kathryn Cooper
• Amelie Veron
• Wenyun Zuo
• Christian Darabos
• Tim Johann
• Vikas Shah
• Joshua L. Payne

Idea

Given the concept of the Metabolism First Hypothesis, how did early simple and essentially random reaction networks evolve into ones that exhibit characteristics of scale-free and small-world (sf-sw) networks? What physically meaningful rules may we find that can lead to this?

Things to consider

• No predefined goal! Besides evolvability. I.e. we don't use a fitness function based on a known goal state.
• How to define fitness? Or, how to define selection without a known fitness function?
  • Yes, I though it might be interesting to run simulations without fitness and selection, just based on the rules of evolution and see what comes out -- Amelie
    • What to do about the explosion of possibilities? [Tim]
• How can we get increasing structural complexity of metabolites?
• Does structural complexity of metaboltes really imply a tendency to sf-sw?

Readings

• nearly anything by Stuart Kauffman (I just borrowed 'The Origins of Order').