Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies.

How and why did natural systems develop the first mechanisms of regulation? How could they turn into adaptive agents in a minimal (though deeply meaningful) biological sense? A novel simulation platform, Araudia, has been implemented to address these tightly interrelated questions, in a prebiotic scenario where metabolically diverse protocells are allowed to modify their dynamic behaviour in response to changes in their boundary conditions (e.g. nutrient concentrations in the medium) and/or in the activity of other protocells, including cross-feeding relationships. On these lines, we extend 'consumer-resource models' to a stochastic evolutionary framework in which novelty appears bottom-up (i.e. from small changes at the individual protocell level), and a short-term memory may also come forth and spread in the population, with the aim to demonstrate that simple (pre-genetic) adaptive/learning processes can have relevant effects at somatic times (i.e. within the lifetime of single protocells). Our interest in exploring the interplay between metabolic-physiological aspects and ecological-evolutionary ones derives from the fact that this provides a complex causal domain in which the actual and the possible talk to each other and, as the results clearly indicate, regulatory and agent capacities become crucial for the survival of infra-biological systems and their subsequent transition towards full-fledged life.This article is part of the theme issue 'Origins of life: the possible and the actual'.