Catalytic promiscuity in the RNA World may have aided the evolution of prebiotic metabolism
Fig 7
The effect of changes in key parameters of the system after 50 000 generations.
This figure contains the results for simulations with D = 0 (left panels) and with D = 5 (right panels). The replication/catalytic activity trade-off parameter was g = 1 in every case. System size (number of enzymatic activity types in the system) is A = 3 (top) and A = 5 (bottom). Maximum replication rate (kmax) and the size of the metabolic neighbourhood (see Fig 3) change from left to right. Square colour (within columns) represents the average of the relative (compared to system size) number of enzymatic activities per replicator after 50 000 generation (Eq 8), scaled from yellow (specialism) to red (generalism), represented by the index of overall catalytic promiscuity G (see Eq 8) within the whole replicator population. White squares indicate system extinction. White circles within coloured squares represent the whole replicator community, the black circles in them show the proportion of parasites (radii representing proportions). Each square / dot is calculated as the mean of at least 5 parallel simulations with the same parameter setting but different random number generator seeds.