Sustainability of Transient Kinetic Regimes and Origins of Death

TL;DR

This paper explores how non-biological systems can sustain transient kinetic regimes, shedding light on life's ability to avoid equilibration, through computational modeling of chemical oscillators and environmental effects.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of sustainability of transient kinetic regimes and demonstrates how structured environments and noise can extend the lifetime of non-equilibrium states.

Findings

Enhanced lifetimes of oscillations observed in the model.

Structured environments contribute to prolonging non-equilibrium regimes.

Noise from the environment plays a key role in extending system lifetimes.

Abstract

It is generally recognized that a distinguishing feature of life is its peculiar capability to avoid equilibration. The origin of this capability and its evolution along the timeline of abiogenesis is not yet understood. We propose to study an analog of this phenomenon that could emerge in non-biological systems. To this end, we introduce the concept of sustainability of transient kinetic regimes. This concept is illustrated via investigation of cooperative effects in an extended system of compartmentalized chemical oscillators under batch and semi-batch conditions. The computational study of a model system shows robust enhancement of lifetimes of the decaying oscillations which translates into the evolution of the survival function of the transient non-equilibrium regime. This model does not rely on any form of replication. Rather, it explores the role of a structured effective environment as a contributor to the system-bath interactions that define non-equilibrium regimes. We implicate the noise produced by the effective environment of a compartmentalized oscillator as the cause of the lifetime extension.