Journal of Chemical Information & Computer Sciences
Reaction indexing for reaction databases
Journal of Chemical Information & Computer Sciences
Chance and necessity in evolution: lessons from RNA
Physica D - Special issue originating from the 18th Annual International Conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos, NM, May 11&mdash ;15, 1998
SIAM Review
The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations
VL '96 Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages
Visualization of Barrier Tree Sequences
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Functional Evolution of Ribozyme-Catalyzed Metabolisms in a Graph-Based Toy-Universe
CMSB '08 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology
Visualization of Graph Products
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Visual network analysis of dynamic metabolic pathways
ISVC'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Advances in visual computing - Volume Part I
A sequence-to-function map for ribozyme-catalyzed metabolisms
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part II
Excess mutual catalysis is required for effective evolvability
Artificial Life
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We developed a simulation tool for investigating the evolution of early metabolism, allowing us to speculate on the formation of metabolic pathways from catalyzed chemical reactions and on the development of their characteristic properties. Our model consists of a protocellular entity with a simple RNA-based genetic system and an evolving metabolism of catalytically active ribozymes that manipulate a rich underlying chemistry. Ensuring an almost open-ended and fairly realistic simulation is crucial for understanding the first steps in metabolic evolution. We show here how our simulation tool can be helpful in arguing for or against hypotheses on the evolution of metabolic pathways. We demonstrate that seemingly mutually exclusive hypotheses may well be compatible when we take into account that different processes dominate different phases in the evolution of a metabolic system. Our results suggest that forward evolution shapes the metabolic networks in the very early steps of evolution. In later and more complex stages, enzyme recruitment supersedes forward evolution, keeping a core set of pathways from the early phase.