Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany.
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany.
Elife. 2019 Jan 4;8:e38187. doi: 10.7554/eLife.38187.
Kleiber's law, or the 3/4 -power law scaling of the metabolic rate with body mass, is considered one of the few quantitative laws in biology, yet its physiological basis remains unknown. Here, we report Kleiber's law scaling in the planarian . Its reversible and life history-independent changes in adult body mass over 3 orders of magnitude reveal that Kleiber's law does not emerge from the size-dependent decrease in cellular metabolic rate, but from a size-dependent increase in mass per cell. Through a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis of the organismal energy balance, we further show that the mass allometry is caused by body size dependent energy storage. Our results reveal the physiological origins of Kleiber's law in planarians and have general implications for understanding a fundamental scaling law in biology.
克莱伯定律，或代谢率与体重的 3/4 次幂比例关系，被认为是生物学中为数不多的定量规律之一，但它的生理基础仍然未知。在这里，我们报告了在扁形动物中的克莱伯定律比例关系。它在成年体重上可实现 3 个数量级的可逆和与生活史无关的变化，表明克莱伯定律不是来自于细胞代谢率随大小的降低，而是来自于每个细胞质量随大小的增加。通过对生物体能量平衡的实验和理论分析相结合，我们进一步表明，质量的异速生长是由身体大小决定的能量储存引起的。我们的研究结果揭示了克莱伯定律在扁形动物中的生理起源，并对理解生物学中的基本比例规律具有普遍意义。
