Competitive exclusion among self-replicating molecules curtails the tendency of chemistry to diversify

Abstract

The transition of chemistry into biology is poorly understood. Key questions include how the inherently divergent nature of chemical reactions can be curtailed, and whether Darwinian principles from biology extend to chemistry. Addressing both questions simultaneously, we now show that the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion, which states that a single niche can be stably occupied by only one species, also applies to self-replicating chemical systems, and that this principle diminishes the tendency of chemistry to diversify. Specifically, we report two systems in which three different self-replicator quasi-species emerge in a largely stochastic fashion from a mixture of two building blocks (resources). Competitive exclusion leads to the selection of only a single quasi-species when all replicators rely to the same extent on both resources. When one of the quasi-species preferentially uses one resource and another quasi-species specializes in the other (resource partitioning), these replicator quasi-species effectively occupy different niches and were found to coexist in an evolutionary stable steady state. It is unclear whether Darwinian principles extend to chemistry and if they can direct chemistry to produce specific products. Now it has been shown that competition between self-replicating molecules can result in the survival of the fittest product or coexistence of a small subset of products, depending on how resources are partitioned between the replicators.