Bistability of compartmentalized autocatalytic systems at the dawn of hereditary variation.

Mutually interacting autocatalytic networks in compartments can form stable, switchable states, enabling primitive inheritance and adaptation before genetic molecules.

• Why it matters: Understanding how early chemical systems could exhibit stable variation and inheritance is crucial for revealing the origins of life and the transition to genetic evolution.
• What they did: The study modeled two autocatalytic networks within compartments, demonstrating that weak cross-catalysis and environmental changes can produce bistable states maintained through stochastic partitioning and selection.
• The result: This work shows that primitive inheritance could have been chemical and attractor-based, providing a new perspective on early evolution and guiding experimental searches for such bistable systems in chemistry.