Complexity Explorer Santa Few Institute

A category of autocatalytic or self-replicative biochemical reaction networks where the constituents in the network act as catalysts for the production of other constituents (themselves catalysts) in the network. In addition, each constituent is able to instruct its own production, and is therefore autocatalytic. Hypercycles, which are a novel class of cyclic networks with nonlinear reaction kinetics, provide a principle and a mechanism for self-organization because they allow the evolution of a set of functionally coupled self-replicative entities.