Metabolic Allometric Scaling of Unicellular Organisms as a Product of Selection Guided by Optimization of Nutrients Distribution in Food Chains

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the metabolic allometric scaling in unicellular organisms results from natural selection optimizing nutrient distribution in food chains, aligning with prior findings in multicellular organisms.

Contribution

It reveals that the same evolutionary principle of nutrient sharing optimization explains metabolic scaling in both unicellular and multicellular organisms.

Findings

Metabolic allometric exponents match experimental values.

Nutrient influx per unit surface increases with organism size.

Scaling is driven by natural selection optimizing resource sharing.

Abstract

One of the major characteristics of living organisms is metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy produced per unit of time. When the mass of organisms increases, the metabolic rate also increases (usually as a power function of mass), but usually slower than mass. This effect is called metabolic allometric scaling. Its causes are considered unknown. The effect has important implications for individual and population organismal development. It was shown in the first part of this study, presented in a separate paper, that in the case of multicellular organisms, this effect is a consequence of natural selection and optimization of nutrient distribution between the species of a food chain, sharing resources of a common habitat. Here, in the second part that studies unicellular organisms, we discover that the same principle of natural selection guided by optimization of nutrient distribution between the species of a food chain defines also metabolic allometric scaling of unicellular organisms. To find that, we consider the metabolic properties of Amoeba proteus, fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus. The sharing of nutrients is optimized in such a way that bigger microorganisms have progressively bigger nutrient influx per unit of surface. This evolutionary arrangement secures the stability of a food chain by providing certain metabolic advantages for bigger organisms. Accounting for this regular increase of nutrient influx with mass increase, we obtained allometric exponents and their ranges close to experimental values, thus proving that metabolic allometric scaling of both multicellular and unicellular organisms is defined by the same fundamental evolutionary principle of optimized sharing of nutrients between the species of a food chain.