ArticleThe ISME journal2016
Evolutionary tradeoffs in cellular composition across diverse bacteria.
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 41 papers.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed.
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- The selfish ribosome.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.ArXiv · 2026Article
- Evolutionary bioenergetics of sporulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Functional gut microbiota dynamics of generalist and specialist bacteria in association with chicken growth.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- How hard is it to encapsulate life? The general constraints on encapsulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Resource allocation to cell envelopes and the scaling of bacterial growth rate.Physical biology · 2025Article
- The design of unit cells by combining the self-reproduction systems and metabolic cushioning loads.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Assembly theory and its relationship with computational complexity.Npj complexity · 2025Article
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Predictions of rhizosphere microbiome dynamics with a genome-informed and trait-based energy budget model.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Self-reproduction and doubling time limits of different cellular subsystems.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2023Article
- Genomic Mysteries of Giant Bacteria: Insights and Implications.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Hyperactive nanobacteria with host-dependent traits pervade Omnitrophota.Nature microbiology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary scaling of maximum growth rate with organism size.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Life and death in the soil microbiome: how ecological processes influence biogeochemistry.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2022Review
- Protein degradation sets the fraction of active ribosomes at vanishing growth.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One of the most important classic and contemporary interests in biology is the connection between cellular composition and physiological function. Decades of research have allowed us to understand the detailed relationship between various cellular components and processes for individual species, and have uncovered common functionality across diverse species. However, there still remains the need for frameworks that can mechanistically predict the tradeoffs between cellular functions and elucidate and interpret average trends across species. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of how cellular composition changes across the diversity of bacteria as connected with physiological function and metabolism, spanning five orders of magnitude in body size. We present an analysis of the trends with cell volume that covers shifts in genomic, protein, cellular envelope, RNA and ribosomal content. We show that trends in protein content are more complex than a simple proportionality with the overall genome size, and that the number of ribosomes is simply explained by cross-species shifts in biosynthesis requirements. Furthermore, we show that the largest and smallest bacteria are limited by physical space requirements. At the lower end of size, cell volume is dominated by DNA and protein content-the requirement for which predicts a lower limit on cell size that is in good agreement with the smallest observed bacteria. At the upper end of bacterial size, we have identified a point at which the number of ribosomes required for biosynthesis exceeds available cell volume. Between these limits we are able to discuss systematic and dramatic shifts in cellular composition. Much of our analysis is connected with the basic energetics of cells where we show that the scaling of metabolic rate is surprisingly superlinear with all cellular components.
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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.