ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The relationship between genome size and metabolic rate in extant vertebrates.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Developmental Cellular Programming: stage-specific architecting muscle and adipose tissues for high-quality meat production.Journal of animal science and biotechnology · 2026Review
- Macroevolution of Steep Interspecific Metabolic Allometry in an Old Insect Order.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Blood capillary geometry helps to explain the link between genome size and metabolic rates.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Evolutionary diversity of muscle OXPHOS efficiencyProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Genome size evolution and phenotypic correlates in the poison frog family Dendrobatidae.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2025Article
- Integrative paleophysiology of the metriorhynchoid Pelagosaurus typus (Pseudosuchia, Thalattosuchia).Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
- Spatial and Temporal Variation of Precipitation Drives the Genome Size Variation inEcology and evolution · 2024Article
- Tetrapod sperm length evolution in relation to body mass is shaped by multiple trade-offs.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Convergent evolution toward a slow pace of life predisposes insular endotherms to anthropogenic extinctions.Science advances · 2024Article
- Polyploidy in Xenopus lowers metabolic rate by decreasing total cell surface area.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Metamorphosis Imposes Variable Constraints on Genome Expansion through Effects on Development.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- The Nuclear-to-Cytoplasmic Ratio: Coupling DNA Content to Cell Size, Cell Cycle, and Biosynthetic Capacity.Annual review of genetics · 2022Review
- Transposons and non-coding regions drive the intrafamily differences of genome size in insects.iScience · 2022Article
- Energetic Lifestyle Drives Size and Shape of Avian Erythrocytes.Integrative and comparative biology · 2022Article
- Scaling of biosynthesis and metabolism with cell size.Molecular biology of the cell · 2022Article
- How Metabolic Rate Relates to Cell Size.Biology · 2022Review
- Measuring metabolic rate in single flies during sleep and waking states via indirect calorimetry.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2022Article
- Genome size drives morphological evolution in organ-specific ways.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Genes underlying the evolution of tetrapod testes size.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Genome Size Covaries More Positively with Propagule Size than Adult Size: New Insights into an Old Problem.Biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Genome size has long been hypothesized to affect the metabolic rate in various groups of animals. The mechanism behind this proposed association is the nucleotypic effect, in which large nucleus and cell sizes influence cellular metabolism through surface area-to-volume ratios. Here, we provide a review of the recent literature on the relationship between genome size and metabolic rate. We also conduct an analysis using phylogenetic comparative methods and a large sample of extant vertebrates. We find no evidence that the effect of genome size improves upon models in explaining metabolic rate variation. Not surprisingly, our results show a strong positive relationship between metabolic rate and body mass, as well as a substantial difference in metabolic rate between endothermic and ectothermic vertebrates, controlling for body mass. The presence of endothermy can also explain elevated rate shifts in metabolic rate whereas genome size cannot. We further find no evidence for a punctuated model of evolution for metabolic rate. Our results do not rule out the possibility that genome size affects cellular physiology in some tissues, but they are consistent with previous research suggesting little support for a direct functional connection between genome size and basal metabolic rate in extant vertebrates. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vertebrate palaeophysiology'.
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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.