Genetics and Genomics Commons^™

Prebiotic Rna Network Formation: A Taxonomy Of Molecular Cooperation, Cole Mathis, Sanjay N. Ramprasad, Sara Imari Walker, Niles Lehman

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Cooperation is essential for evolution of biological complexity. Recent work has shown game theoretic arguments, commonly used to model biological cooperation, can also illuminate the dynamics of chemical systems. Here we investigate the types of cooperation possible in a real RNA system based on the Azoarcusribozyme, by constructing a taxonomy of possible cooperative groups. We construct a computational model of this system to investigate the features of the real system promoting cooperation. We find triplet interactions among genotypes are intrinsically biased towards cooperation due to the particular distribution of catalytic rate constants measured empirically in the real system. For other …