The Encyclopedia Autocatalytica is intended to serve as a recipe book; a starting point to learn about autocatalytic chemical reaction sets that lead to the design of new origins of life experiments. These recipes can also be used to test out alternative ways of generating life-like (false positive) disequilibria that might be mistakenly interpreted as evidence of life. It is almost entirely based on material presented in Peng et al. (2023) in JACS.
The effort was sparked by an offhand observation at a Santa Fe Institute discussion that there were very few examples of autocatalytic chemical reaction sets in nature outside of biology, and even fewer that were suitable for prebiotic chemical experimentation. The most prominent examples are the formose reaction, the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, and on the structural/protocell side of things the RAFT-PISA system. Most of what you will find on this site are CompACs: comproportionation-based autocatalytic cycles. Although the key species in these cycles are inorganic, they serve as a starting point for coupling environmental redox energy transduction into organic synthesis. It’s a wide open area of study, with over 250 new cycles using elements from all across the periodic table that can serve as candidate systems for experimentation.
If you come across any other reactions that might help form an autocatalytic cycle in a similar fashion, please reach out to us! We’d be happy to feature it in our inventory.
Encyclopedia Autocatalytica 