ArticleThe ISME journal2017
The evolution of bacterial cell size: the internal diffusion-constraint hypothesis.
Article in The ISME journal, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Position-Independent Particle Sizing in High-Precision Impedance Cytometry via Full-Waveform Feature Calibration.Electrophoresis · 2026Article
- The community, assembly process and potential functions of bacteria with different cell size in a river.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Passage-Dependent Size Distributions of Human-Derived Cells: Implications for Metabolic Assays.FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology · 2026Article
- Non-canonical resource allocation in heterotrophically growing Thermoanaerobacter kivui.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cell Geometry Limits Bacterial Metabolic Efficiency.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Resource allocation to cell envelopes and the scaling of bacterial growth rate.Physical biology · 2025Article
- Environmental stresses on diatom and dinoflagellate morphology and community structure in the western Pacific Ocean.iScience · 2025Article
- Depletion of CpG dinucleotides in bacterial genomes may represent an adaptation to high temperatures.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Bacterial microcompartments as a next-generation metabolic engineering tool: utilizing nature's solution for confining challenging catabolic pathways.Biochemical Society transactions · 2024Review
- Longitudinal diffusion barriers imposed by myofilaments and mitochondria in murine cardiac myocytes.The Journal of general physiology · 2023Article
- Genomic Mysteries of Giant Bacteria: Insights and Implications.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Pore-like diffusion barriers in murine cardiac myocytes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary scaling of maximum growth rate with organism size.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Long-term experimental evolution decouples size and production costs inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Primordial mimicry induces morphological change in Escherichia coli.Communications biology · 2022Article
- The Effect of the Protein Synthesis Entropy Reduction on the Cell Size Regulation and Division Size of Unicellular Organisms.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Article
- Scaling of joint mass and metabolism fluctuations in in silico cell-laden spheroids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Biological scaling in green algae: the role of cell size and geometry.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Size is one of the most important biological traits influencing organismal ecology and evolution. However, we know little about the drivers of body size evolution in unicellulars. A long-term evolution experiment (Lenski's LTEE) in which Escherichia coli adapts to a simple glucose medium has shown that not only the growth rate and the fitness of the bacterium increase over time but also its cell size. This increase in size contradicts prominent 'external diffusion' theory (EDC) predicting that cell size should have evolved toward smaller cells. Among several scenarios, we propose and test an alternative 'internal diffusion-constraint' (IDC) hypothesis for cell size evolution. A change in cell volume affects metabolite concentrations in the cytoplasm. The IDC states that a higher metabolism can be achieved by a reduction in the molecular traffic time inside of the cell, by increasing its volume. To test this hypothesis, we studied a population from the LTEE. We show that bigger cells with greater growth and CO
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.