Adaptive diversification of growth allometry in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

ABSTRACT: Seed plants vary tremendously in size and morphology; however, variation and covariation in plant traits may be governed, at least in part, by universal biophysical laws and biological constants. Metabolic scaling theory (MST) posits that whole-organismal metabolism and growth rate are under stabilizing selection that minimizes the scaling of hydrodynamic resistance and maximizes the scaling of resource uptake. This constrains variation in physiological traits and in the rate of biomass accumulation, so that they can be expressed as mathematical functions of plant size with near-constant allometric scaling exponents across species. However, the observed variation in scaling exponents calls into question the evolutionary drivers and the universality of allometric equations. We have measured

SUBMITTER: Vasseur F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5879651 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature