Self-replicating reverse micelles and chemical autopoiesis

Whether or not and to what extent synthetic chemical structures are able to self-replicate is a fascinating and important question, as it binds chemistry with one of the most basic cell processes. A few ingenious chemical structures endowed with the property of self-replication have been proposed over the years, some of them including nucleotides as basic units. It is the aim of this paper to provide the first experimental evidence of a closed, self-replicating chemical structure, which can be seen as a simple chemical autopoietic system.