Catalytic promiscuity in the RNA World may have aided the evolution of prebiotic metabolism
Fig 9
The effect of activity/replicability trade-off (g).
This figure contains the results for simulations with D = 0 (left panels) and with D = 5 (right panels). The system size (number of enzymatic activity types in the system) is A = 3 and maximum replication rate is kmax = 4.0 in all these simulations. Rows differ in metabolic neighbourhood sizes (top-down: Nmet = 5 (vonNeumann), Nmet = 9 (Moore), Nmet = 25 (5x5)). In the basic figures, the activity/replicability trade-off (g) gets weaker from left to right and the catalytic trade-off gets weaker from bottom to top. Square colour (within columns) represents the average relative (compared to system size) number of enzymatic activities per grid site after 50 000 generation (Eq 8), scaled from yellow (specialism) to red (generalism), that is calculated 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 proportions of parasites to the total number of replicators (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.