Category: Ecology

Summary: Finding how much directional exchange asymmetry a parasite-resilient hypercycle compartment can tolerate.

Compartmentalized hypercycles can suppress molecular parasites through spatial isolation. But real protocells would have experienced directional flows (e.g., concentration gradients, membrane asymmetries). This experiment asks: how much directional asymmetry in inter-compartment exchange can a parasite-resilient hypercycle tolerate before its protective localized mode collapses?

The experiment constructs modular hypercycle Jacobians with parasite pressure and directional exchange asymmetry, then bisects the asymmetry parameter to find where the growth-mode delocalizes across compartments.

This combines hypercycle compartmentalization with directional migration in a way not previously mapped at finite sizes.

Method: GPU dense Jacobian eigensolve with iterative deepening. Fixed parasite pressure, bisection on exchange asymmetry.

What is measured: Critical asymmetry threshold, compartment participation ratio, delocalization transition.