thumb|400px|Reaction scheme of the chemoton, showing the interplay of metabolism, information and structural closure. Based on Fig. 1.1 of Gánti (2003)The term chemoton (short for 'chemical automaton') refers to an abstract model for the fundamental unit of life introduced by Hungarian theoretical biologist Tibor Gánti. Gánti conceived the basic idea in 1952 and formulated the concept in 1971 in his book The Principles of Life (originally written in Hungarian, and translated to English only in 2003). He suggested that the chemoton was the original ancestor of all organisms.
thumb|400px|Reaction scheme of the chemoton, showing the interplay of metabolism, information and structural closure. Based on Fig. 1.1 of Gánti (2003)The term chemoton (short for 'chemical automaton') refers to an abstract model for the fundamental unit of life introduced by Hungarian theoretical biologist Tibor Gánti. Gánti conceived the basic idea in 1952 and formulated the concept in 1971 in his book The Principles of Life (originally written in Hungarian, and translated to English only in 2003). He suggested that the chemoton was the original ancestor of all organisms.
The basic assumption of the model is that life should fundamentally and essentially have three properties: metabolism, self-replication, and a bilipid membrane. The metabolic and replication functions together form an autocatalytic subsystem necessary for the basic functions of life, and a membrane encloses this subsystem to separate it from the surrounding environment. Therefore, any system having such properties may be regarded as alive, and it will be subjected to natural selection and contain a self-sustaining cellular information. Some consider this model a significant contribution to origin of life as it provides a philosophy of evolutionary units.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).