Related papers: Metabolic scaling in small life forms

All cells derive nutrition by absorbing some chemical and energy resources from the environment; these resources are used by the cells to reproduce the chemicals within them, which in turn leads to an increase in their volume. In this…

Cancer cells are often seen to prefer glycolytic metabolism over oxidative phosphorylation even in the presence of oxygen-a phenomenon termed the Warburg effect. Despite significant strides in the decades since its discovery, a clear basis…

Eukaryotic adaptation pathways operate within wide-ranging environmental conditions without stimulus saturation. Despite numerous differences in the adaptation mechanisms employed by bacteria and eukaryotes, all require energy consumption.…

Metabolism is a fascinating cell machinery underlying life and disease and genome-scale reconstructions provide us with a captivating view of its complexity. However, deciphering the relationship between metabolic structure and function…

Optimization-based models have been used to predict cellular behavior for over 25 years. The constraints in these models are derived from genome annotations, measured macro-molecular composition of cells, and by measuring the cell's growth…

In stable environments, cell size fluctuations are thought to be governed by simple physical principles, as suggested by recent findings of scaling properties. Here, by developing a microfluidic device and using E. coli, we investigate the…

Cells can use periodic enzyme activities to adapt to periodic environments or existing internal rhythms and to establish metabolic cycles that schedule biochemical processes in time. A periodically changing allocation of the protein budget…

We revisit the modeling of the diauxic growth of a pure microorganism on two distinct sugars which was first described by Monod. Most available models are deterministic and make the assumption that all cells of the microbial ecosystem…

The cytoplasm of a living cell is crowded with several macromolecules of different shapes and sizes. Molecular diffusion in such a medium becomes anomalous due to the presence of macromolecules and diffusivity is expected to decrease with…

The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…

Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…

Metabolic energy consumption has long been thought to play a major role in the aging process ({\it 1}). Across species, a gram of tissue on average expends about the same amount of energy during life-span ({\it 2}). Energy restriction has…

Obesity does not emerge abruptly; rather, it develops gradually over extended periods. The gradual progression often prevents early recognition of physiological changes until excess adiposity is established. A common belief is that weight…

The regulation of metabolic activity by tuning enzyme expression levels is crucial to sustain cellular growth in changing environments. Metabolic networks are often studied at steady state using constraint-based models and optimization…

We study analytically and numerically a model metabolic cycle composed of an arbitrary number of species of catalytically active particles. Each species converts a substrate into a product, the latter being used as the substrate by the next…

We characterize the distributions of short cycles in a large metabolic network previously shown to have small world characteristics and a power law degree distribution. Compared with three classes of random networks, including Erdoes-Renyi…

Despite major environmental and genetic differences, microbial metabolic networks are known to generate consistent physiological outcomes across vastly different organisms. This remarkable robustness suggests that, at least in bacteria,…

Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…

The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…

Motility is an essential factor for an organism's survival and diversification. With the advent of novel single-cell technologies, analytical frameworks and theoretical methods, we can begin to probe the complex lives of microscopic motile…