Related papers: Metabolic scaling in small life forms
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
We propose a discrete model to determine the metabolic scaling exponent based on Fibonacci growth patterns and discrete biological development phases. In contrast to continuous fractal models such as the West-Brown-Enquist (WBE) theory, the…
In a cell or microorganism the processes that generate mass, energy, information transfer, and cell fate specification are seamlessly integrated through a complex network of various cellular constituents and reactions. However, despite the…
The quarter power allometric scaling of mammalian metabolic rate is largely regarded as a universal law of biology. However, it is well known that cell cultures do not obey this law. The current thinking is that were in-vitro cultures to…
Computation of biological processes creates great promise for everyday life and great challenges for physical scientists. Simulations of molecular dynamics appeal to biologists as a natural extension of structural biology. Once biologists…
In earlier work, we introduced a discrete Fibonacci-based ontogenetic model in which the metabolic scaling exponent $b(n)$ is treated as a dynamic function of an organism's developmental stage, and we estimated $b(n)$ for selected mammalian…
The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. Previous studies have utilized flux balance analysis and the maximum entropy method to predict…
Understanding design principles of complex cellular organization is one of the major challenges in biology. Recent analysis of the large-scale cellular organization has revealed the scale-free nature and robustness of metabolic and protein…
A central debate in biology has been the allometric scaling of metabolic rate. Kleiber's observation that animals' basal metabolic rate scales to the 3/4-power of body mass (Kleiber's rule) has been the prevailing hypothesis in the last…
Metabolism plays a central role in cell physiology because it provides the molecular machinery for growth. At the genome-scale, metabolism is made up of thousands of reactions interacting with one another. Untangling this complexity is key…
It has been reported that the number of transcription factors encoded in prokaryotic genomes scales approximately quadratically with their total number of genes. We propose a conceptual explanation of this finding and illustrate it using a…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
Phenotypic variation is a hallmark of cellular physiology. Metabolic heterogeneity, in particular, underpins single-cell phenomena such as microbial drug tolerance and growth variability. Much research has focussed on transcriptomic and…
The solution space of genome-scale models of cellular metabolism provides a map between physically viable flux configurations and cellular metabolic phenotypes described, at the most basic level, by the corresponding growth rates. By…
Mathematical and computational models can assist in gaining an understanding of cell behavior at many levels of organization. Here, we review models in the literature that focus on eukaryotic cell motility at 3 size scales: intracellular…
Cells achieve size homeostasis by regulating their division timing based on their size, added size, and cell cycle time. Previous research under steady-state conditions demonstrated the robustness of these mechanisms. However, their dynamic…
Metabolic models condense biochemical knowledge about organisms in a structured and standardised way. As large-scale network reconstructions are readily available for many organisms, genome-scale models are being widely used among modellers…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…