Clarifying Metabolic Scaling in Prokaryotes: Improved Data Quality and Methodology

Metabolic scaling—the positive correlation between metabolic rate and organism size—exists across broad taxonomic groups and provides a foundation for predicting biological processes at various levels, from individuals to ecosystems. Research has shown that distinct metabolic scaling patterns emerge within prokaryotes, protists, plants, and metazoans. However, recent work has challenged the idea that cell size, genome size, and growth rate are correlated within the prokaryotes. A recent paper by Westoby et al. (2021) found no such correlation, possibly due to differences in species selection and dataset methodology. We propose to analyze whether dataset inaccuracies, particularly in how metabolic rates are measured and whether they were measured at the maximum growth temperature, obscure the metabolic scaling relationship in prokaryotes. We will target the Westoby et al. (2021) dataset in our analysis by manually checking the primary literature from which the data was derived and comparing the dataset to the papers that successfully showed a metabolic scaling relationship in prokaryotes. This analysis will clarify the relationship between metabolic rate and organism size in prokaryotes, with significant implications for understanding evolutionary constraints on prokaryotic life and the fundamental principles governing biological scaling laws.