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SYSTEMS CHEMISTRY

Rhythm before life

The chemical functionality necessary for the origin of life may have emerged from simple reactions assembled into complex networks. Now, it has been shown that prebiotically relevant heterogeneous reaction networks can generate robust oscillations within complex mixtures comprised of precursors that do not oscillate on their own.

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Fig. 1: The reaction network presenting collective behaviour.

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Correspondence to Gonen Ashkenasy.

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Wagner, N., Ashkenasy, G. Rhythm before life. Nat. Chem. 11, 681–683 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0301-2

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