Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA.
Compr Physiol. 2012 Oct;2(4):2527-40. doi: 10.1002/cphy.c110009.
Although firmly grounded in metabolic biochemistry, the study of energy metabolism has gone well beyond this discipline and become integrative and comparative as well as ecological and evolutionary in scope. At the cellular level, ATP is hydrolyzed by energy-expending processes and resynthesized by pathways in bioenergetics. A significant development in the study of bioenergetics is the realization that fluxes through pathways as well as metabolic rates in cells, tissues, organs, and whole organisms are "system properties." Therefore, studies of energy metabolism have become, increasingly, experiments in systems biology. A significant challenge continues to be the integration of phenomena over multiple levels of organization. Body mass and temperature are said to account for most of the variation in metabolic rates found in nature. A mechanistic foundation for the understanding of these patterns is outlined. It is emphasized that evolution, leading to adaptation to diverse lifestyles and environments, has resulted in a tremendous amount of deviation from popularly accepted scaling "rules." This is especially so in the deep sea which constitutes most of the biosphere.
尽管能量代谢的研究牢牢扎根于代谢生物化学，但它已经超越了这一学科，成为具有综合性、比较性、生态性和进化性的学科。在细胞水平上，ATP 通过耗能过程被水解，通过生物能学途径被重新合成。生物能学研究的一个重要进展是认识到，细胞、组织、器官和整个生物体中途径的通量以及代谢率都是“系统特性”。因此，能量代谢的研究越来越成为系统生物学的实验。一个持续存在的重要挑战是整合多个组织层次的现象。据称，体重和温度解释了自然界中发现的大多数代谢率变化。本文概述了理解这些模式的机制基础。需要强调的是，进化导致了对不同生活方式和环境的适应，导致了与流行的接受的缩放“规则”的巨大偏离。在构成大部分生物圈的深海中尤其如此。
