ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Long-term experimental evolution decouples size and production costs in
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Per capita sperm metabolism is density dependent.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Pooled it
- Conserved rod-to-spherical shape transitions in Escherichia coli through primordial experimental adaptations.Bioscience reports · 2026Article
- Drivers and Consequences of Size Declines in Unicells.Ecology letters · 2026Review
- Emergent collective alignment gives competitive advantage to longer cells during range expansion.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Biodiversity modulates the cross-community scaling relationship in changing environments.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Resource allocation to cell envelopes and the scaling of bacterial growth rate.Physical biology · 2025Article
- Community living causes changes in metabolic behavior and is permitted by specific growth conditions in two bacterial co-culture systems.Journal of bacteriology · 2025Article
- Evolution Under Competition Increases Population Production by Reducing the Density-Dependence of Net Energy Fluxes and Growth.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of temperate phages in periodic environments.Virus evolution · 2025Article
- Evolutionary shift of a tipping point can precipitate, or forestall, collapse in a microbial community.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- The evolution of autonomy from two cooperative specialists in fluctuating environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Consequences of the cost of living: is variation in metabolic rate evolutionarily significant?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Relationships between intrinsic population growth rate, carrying capacity and metabolism in microbial populations.The ISME journal · 2023Review
- Mechanistic constraints on the trade-off between photosynthesis and respiration in response to warming.Science advances · 2023Article
- Copepod life history evolution under high- and low-food regimes.Evolutionary applications · 2023Article
- Case Studies in the Assessment of Microbial Fitness: Seemingly Subtle Changes Can Have Major Effects on Phenotypic Outcomes.Journal of molecular evolution · 2023Article
- Rapamycin supplementation ofRoyal Society open science · 2023Article
- Cell Sorting-Directed Selection of Bacterial Cells in Bigger Sizes Analyzed by Imaging Flow Cytometry during Experimental Evolution.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Body size covaries with population dynamics across life’s domains. Metabolism may impose fundamental constraints on the coevolution of size and demography, but experimental tests of the causal links remain elusive. We leverage a 60,000-generation experiment in which Escherichia coli populations evolved larger cells to examine intraspecific metabolic scaling and correlations with demographic parameters. Over the course of their evolution, the cells have roughly doubled in size relative to their ancestors. These larger cells have metabolic rates that are absolutely higher, but relative to their size, they are lower. Metabolic theory successfully predicted the relations between size, metabolism, and maximum population density, including support for Damuth’s law of energy equivalence, such that populations of larger cells achieved lower maximum densities but higher maximum biomasses than populations of smaller cells. The scaling of metabolism with cell size thus predicted the scaling of size with maximum population density. In stark contrast to standard theory, however, populations of larger cells grew faster than those of smaller cells, contradicting the fundamental and intuitive assumption that the costs of building new individuals should scale directly with their size. The finding that the costs of production can be decoupled from size necessitates a reevaluation of the evolutionary drivers and ecological consequences of biological size more generally.
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