In silicon emergence of an autonomous artificial metabolic system

In this work, we establish and evolve an artificial metabolic system in silicon to shed light on how the metabolic mechanism emerged. This system is composed of two subsystems: the artificial genome subsystem (AGS) and the artificial metabolite subsystem (AMS). The whole system is designed to be capable of being autonomous: the dynamics of AGS is capable of situating itself to the dynamics of AMS to provide it with enzymes in the right time and quantity; the dynamics of AMS is capable of implementing the metabolic function and harvest energy so as to pay back the energy consumption of AGS. This kind of autonomous state requires an intricate structure of the AGS. So it is almost impossible to be predetermined manually. With the help of an evolutionary computational method that has a hierarchical mutational structure, the artificial metabolic system with this kind of autonomous state eventually emerged in silicon. We find that ATP and ADP molecules have an important role in making the state of the system autonomous. We also find that the emerged structure of AGS ensemble existing biological structures in the natural cells.