Autocatalysis is a deceptively simple concept, referring to the situation that a chemical
species $ X $ catalyzes its own formation. From the perspective of chemical kinetics,
autocatalysts show a regime of super-linear growth. Given a chemical reaction network,
however, it is not at all straightforward to identify species that are autocatalytic in the sense
that there is a sub-network that takes $ X $ as input and produces more than one copy of $ X
$ as output. The difficulty arises from the need to distinguish autocatalysis eg from the …