autocatalysis
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A chemical reaction is autocatalytic if one of the reaction products is also a catalyst for the same reaction. Many forms of autocatalysis are recognized.
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Encyclopedic overview
7 sectionsContents
- Examples
- Mathematical description
- Asymmetric autocatalysis
- Possible role in origin of life
- See also
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A chemical reaction is autocatalytic if one of the reaction products is also a catalyst for the same reaction. Many forms of autocatalysis are recognized.
A set of chemical reactions can be said to be "collectively autocatalytic" if a number of those reactions produce, as reaction products, catalysts for enough of the other reactions that the entire set of chemical reactions is self-sustaining given an input of energy and food molecules (see autocatalytic set).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “autocatalysis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.