Abstract
It’s all about fluxes and rates! Environmental resources are available to microbes in form of fluxes of energy and matter. Some important intrinsic relationships exist between thermodynamics and rate, where the flux of energy can explain and predict microbial phenotypes such as the molecular architecture of metabolic pathways, as well as fitness and selection at the level of populations and microbial communities. The genetic and phenotypic diversity in the microbial world is a direct consequence of the thermodynamic-kinetic relationship. This chapter also provides examples for how these principles affect and scale through microbial biology.
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Further Reading
Basan et al (2015) Overflow metabolism in Escherichia coli results from efficient proteome allocation. Nature 528:99–104
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Wortel et al (2016) Evolutionary pressure on microbial strategies in the chemostat. Sci Rep 6:29503. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep29503
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Spormann, A.M. (2023). Microbial Kinetics. In: Principles of Microbial Metabolism and Metabolic Ecology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28218-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28218-8_5
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