ArticleScientific reports2022
Evolutionary scaling of maximum growth rate with organism size.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Energetics and evolution: Response to Martin.Biochimica et biophysica acta. Bioenergetics · 2026Article
- A 15-Year Computational Twin Modeling Study of Botulinum Toxin A Frequency and Age-Related Facial Aging.Aesthetic plastic surgery · 2026Article
- Algorithmic reconstruction of trophic networks from open-access species lists reveals key organisms in real ecosystems.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- 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
- A narrow range of transcript-error rates across the Tree of Life.Science advances · 2025Article
- Resource allocation to cell envelopes and the scaling of bacterial growth rate.Physical biology · 2025Article
- Linking Cell Size, VEnvironmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- Temperature structuring of microbial communities on a global scale.Current opinion in microbiology · 2024Review
- The bioenergetic cost of building a metazoan.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Scaling of respiration in colonial invertebrates.Limnology and oceanography · 2024Article
- Patterns of Change in Nucleotide Diversity Over Gene Length.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Genomic Mysteries of Giant Bacteria: Insights and Implications.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Data from nearly 1000 species reveal the upper bound to rates of biomass production achievable by natural selection across the Tree of Life. For heterotrophs, maximum growth rates scale positively with organism size in bacteria but negatively in eukaryotes, whereas for phototrophs, the scaling is negligible for cyanobacteria and weakly negative for eukaryotes. These results have significant implications for understanding the bioenergetic consequences of the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, and of the expansion of some groups of the latter into multicellularity. The magnitudes of the scaling coefficients for eukaryotes are significantly lower than expected under any proposed physical-constraint model. Supported by genomic, bioenergetic, and population-genetic data and theory, an alternative hypothesis for the observed negative scaling in eukaryotes postulates that growth-diminishing mutations with small effects passively accumulate with increasing organism size as a consequence of associated increases in the power of random genetic drift. In contrast, conditional on the structural and functional features of ribosomes, natural selection has been able to promote bacteria with the fastest possible growth rates, implying minimal conflicts with both bioenergetic constraints and random genetic drift. If this extension of the drift-barrier hypothesis is correct, the interpretations of comparative studies of biological traits that have traditionally ignored differences in population-genetic environments will require revisiting.
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