Energy and Self-Organisation in Systems Chemistry: Building the Missing Theory

Obiettivo

Chemical reaction networks (CRNs) underpin both living and synthetic systems, enabling compartmentalisation, energy transduction, homeostasis, and adaptive organisation. On the synthetic side, systems chemistry has achieved remarkable progress in making CRNs produce complex behaviours, yet it lacks predictive principles to guide design. On the biological side, we still lack a framework that explains how living systems operate and maintain organisation through complex chemistries. At the same time, nonequilibrium physics has made major advances, delivering powerful tools to quantify energy flows, responses, and fluctuations far from equilibrium. These developments call for a unifying theory of systems chemistry.

Building on advances from my group—gear and circuit formalisms for energy transduction, exact fluctuation–response identities, thermodynamics of growth in open CRNs, and chemically consistent random ensembles—we will develop a predictive framework for CRNs operating far from equilibrium. The project pursues four objectives: (I) generalise energy transduction theory from simple cycles to modular, multimolecular CRNs, to reveal how efficiency and adaptability emerge across scales, with applications from dissipative assemblies to metabolic energetics; (II) establish nonequilibrium response theory for nonlinear CRNs, to derive predictive rules for sensitivity, robustness, and inference; (III) develop thermodynamics of CRNs in evolving compartments, to explain how growth, division, and ecological-like interactions arise from chemical–mechanical coupling; and (IV) construct statistical and dynamical frameworks for large CRNs, to identify universal organising principles and control entropic growth.

By extending nonequilibrium thermodynamics to a predictive theory of CRNs and complex chemistries, this project will provide foundations for systems chemistry as a rational design science and clarify how the principles of life emerge from physicochemistry.