Metabolic allometry: A genomic approach to scaling

Abstract

The high complexity of living beings represents a difficult challenge to understand how different levels of organizations are interconnected, being especially difficult to identify how certain higher levels are affected by cellular dynamics. Important advances in ecology have shown that many phenomena can be explained through a power-law relationship, being the cellular metabolism a key component in this complexity networks scaling with a regular exponent related to body size and temperature. Here, using a novel approach we estimate the energy used to synthesize the portion of the genome that codes the metabolism searching for genomic scaling rules in five different species with higher differences in body sizes. We found that the energy of this genetic portion scales in a power-law relationship related to the mass of the species analyzed.