- Chemoton
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The chemoton is an abstract model for life introduced by Tibor Gánti in 1971. Its aim was to define the minimal model of a living organism.
A living system:
- Has to be separated from its environment.
- Has to perform metabolism with its environment.
- It must replicate itself.
- It has to have a polymer type subsystem carrying information.
- It must have an autocatalytic system, which is connected to the metabolism and creates the stuff needed to grow its boundary and to replicate its information system.
Such a system may be called alive, since it can live, replicate in its proper environment and it can evolve, since there is an information system.
See also
- Hypercycle (chemistry) by Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster
- Quasispecies model
References
This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Chemoton", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.
- T. Gánti: The principles of life Oxford University Press 2003.
- T. Gánti: Chemoton theory Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers 2003.
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