Protocell Bioreactor: Self-Replicating Life in a Controlled Vessel

Building and sustaining an artificial, self-replicating living system is fundamentally a control problem: a minimal protocell — a lipid vesicle enclosing a nutrient-consuming, growth-and-division cycle — only survives inside a narrow band of temperature, nutrient supply and membrane permeability. This simulator models one bounded reaction vessel seeded with a single self-replicating protocell whose volume grows from diffusive nutrient uptake and which divides once it crosses a size threshold, passing on a slightly noisy copy of its own growth parameters to each daughter. Push temperature or nutrient supply outside the viable range and the population starves, denatures or overloads and collapses; keep it inside that range and a real-time 3D bioreactor fills with a growing, dividing, occasionally dying colony — a compact model of the environmental engineering problem at the heart of synthetic and origin-of-life biology.