posted on 2015-02-11, 00:00authored byGiulia Leonetti, Sijbren Otto
In
Darwinian evolution, species that are better adapted to their
environment win the competition for common resources from less well-adapted
competitors. Thus, in such scenarios the nature of the environment
may dictate the outcome of the competition. We investigated to what
degree these biological principles acting at the level of species
extend to the molecular level into systems based on fully synthetic
self-replicating molecules. We now report two systems in which two
replicators compete for a common building block and where the environment
dictates which of the two replicators wins. We observed that subtle
changes in the environment can lead to dramatic differences in the
outcome of the competition.