Fig. 9

The spread of protocells and the descending of naked ribozymes in a near-reality system. The system is a 40 × 40 grid, which has a 20 × 20 rocky region in the center and a solution region outside the rocky region (see Fig. 10b for a reference). The rocky region corresponds to the naked scene, running with default parameter values list in Table 1. In the solution region, compared with the rocky region, the moving rate of molecules (P_MV) is ten times; the rates associated with degradation(including P_BB, P_ND, P_NDE and P_AD) are twice (but not apply to the inside of protocells); the rates associated with synthesis (including P_RL and P_NF) are one twentieth. Similar to the black-line case in Fig. 5, 50 REP molecules and 50 NSR molecules are inoculated at step 1 × 10⁵ into the rocky region. The black symbols in the upper panel demonstrate the evolutionary dynamics of the naked scene without the inoculation of protocells. Based upon this case, at step 6× 10⁶, ten protocells, each containing five REP molecules and five NSR molecules, are inoculated into the solution region (at randomly chosen grid rooms), deriving the case represented by red symbols. The lower panel shows the variation of the number of REP and NSR molecules inside protocells