ArticleThe ISME journal2016
The allometry of the smallest: superlinear scaling of microbial metabolic rates in the Atlantic Ocean.
Article in The ISME journal, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Drivers and Consequences of Size Declines in Unicells.Ecology letters · 2026Review
- Long-term experimental evolution decouples size and production costs inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Effect of temperature on the unimodal size scaling of phytoplankton growth.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Enzymatic origin and various curvatures of metabolic scaling in microbes.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The Chemical Transformation of the Cellular Toxin INT (2-(4-Iodophenyl)-3-(4-Nitrophenyl)-5-(Phenyl) Tetrazolium Chloride) as an Indicator of Prior Respiratory Activity in Aquatic Bacteria.International journal of molecular sciences · 2019Article
- Linking phytoplankton community metabolism to the individual size distribution.Ecology letters · 2018Article
- Prediction of Clearance, Volume of distribution, and Half-life of Drugs in Extremely Low to Low Birth Weight Neonates: An Allometric Approach.European journal of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics · 2017Article
- Major evolutionary transitions of life, metabolic scaling and the number and size of mitochondria and chloroplasts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prokaryotic planktonic organisms are small in size but largely relevant in marine biogeochemical cycles. Due to their reduced size range (0.2 to 1 μm in diameter), the effects of cell size on their metabolism have been hardly considered and are usually not examined in field studies. Here, we show the results of size-fractionated experiments of marine microbial respiration rate along a latitudinal transect in the Atlantic Ocean. The scaling exponents obtained from the power relationship between respiration rate and size were significantly higher than one. This superlinearity was ubiquitous across the latitudinal transect but its value was not universal revealing a strong albeit heterogeneous effect of cell size on microbial metabolism. Our results suggest that the latitudinal differences observed are the combined result of changes in cell size and composition between functional groups within prokaryotes. Communities where the largest size fraction was dominated by prokaryotic cyanobacteria, especially Prochlorococcus, have lower allometric exponents. We hypothesize that these larger, more complex prokaryotes fall close to the evolutionary transition between prokaryotes and protists, in a range where surface area starts to constrain metabolism and, hence, are expected to follow a scaling closer to linearity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.