Scaling laws in enzyme function reveal a new kind of biochemical universality.

ABSTRACT: All life on Earth is unified by its use of a shared set of component chemical compounds and reactions, providing a detailed model for universal biochemistry. However, this notion of universality is specific to known biochemistry and does not allow quantitative predictions about examples not yet observed. Here, we introduce a more generalizable concept of biochemical universality that is more akin to the kind of universality found in physics. Using annotated genomic datasets including an ensemble of 11,955 metagenomes, 1,282 archaea, 11,759 bacteria, and 200 eukaryotic taxa, we show how enzyme functions form universality classes with common scaling behavior in their relative abundances across the datasets. We verify that these scaling laws are not explained by the presence of compounds, rea

SUBMITTER: Gagler DC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8892295 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature