Major evolutionary transitions of life, metabolic scaling and the number and size of mitochondria and chloroplasts.

ABSTRACT: We investigate the effects of trophic lifestyle and two types of major evolutionary transitions in individuality-the endosymbiotic acquisition of organelles and development of multicellularity-on organellar and cellular metabolism and allometry. We develop a quantitative framework linking the size and metabolic scaling of eukaryotic cells to the abundance, size and metabolic scaling of mitochondria and chloroplasts and analyse a newly compiled, unprecedented database representing unicellular and multicellular cells covering diverse phyla and tissues. Irrespective of cellularity, numbers and total volumes of mitochondria scale linearly with cell volume, whereas chloroplasts scale sublinearly and sizes of both organelles remain largely invariant with cell size. Our framework allows us to est

SUBMITTER: Okie JG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4892803 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature