Figure 7.

Synthetic hypercycles for terraformation. Taking the strict cooperation motif from [20], and making a chain of them, we obtain a hypercycle that ensures the presence of all the species (a). However, in a Martian context, we may want to ensure the production of certain metabolites in order to maintain a circularity of the overall metabolism (b). In this motif, the same function would be implemented by different species, achieving a more resilient consortium. The closed autocatalysis guarantees that all the functional groups will be maintained but the species fraction could change depending on external factors (here qualitatively illustrated by means of histograms). In a Martian context, the autocatalytic cycle can be useful in two situations. First, if the synthetic organisms are deployed on the planet, depending on their death and growth rates, they will grow explosively or get extinct. This can occur in different ways (c,d) depending on the type of dynamical regime (c: spatial spread, d: bioreactor) considered. The bioreactor implementation (e) of the functional hypercycle (of 3 elements) ensures that all the functions will be optimally represented.