Abstract
There are empirical indications of an isometric scaling relationship between plants’ respiratory metabolism rates and nitrogen contents. To test the hypothesis that there may be a similar relationship between plants’ respiratory metabolism and phosphorus contents we used data obtained from 150 laboratory and field-grown seedlings representing 30 herbaceous species and 20 woody deciduous species. Our results show that whole-plant respiration rates strongly scaled to the 0.81-power of the whole-plant phosphorus content, across wide ranges of growth conditions and functional classifications. Moreover, we also found a similar scaling exponent between whole-plant respiration rates and total nitrogen contents for the same set of samples. The similarities of the metabolic scaling relationships suggest that similar mechanisms may be involved in the transport and storage of phosphorus and nitrogen in plants.
Highlights
As an essential component of key enzymes nitrogen is involved in crucial metabolic processes in plants and is tightly coupled with respiratory metabolism at multiple levels[17,18,19,20,21]
According to the pooled data for all seedlings of 50 plant species grown under greenhouse and field conditions (Table S1), the aboveground respiration rates scaled to the 0.81-power of the aboveground phosphorus content (Fig. 1a)
Our measurements of 150 small laboratory- and field-grown plants of 50 species (Table S1) indicate that there is a very strong scaling relationship between plants’ respiration rates and their phosphorus contents, with a scaling exponent of 0.81 for both whole plants and their aboveground parts that is not affected by the growth conditions
Summary
As an essential component of key enzymes nitrogen is involved in crucial metabolic processes in plants and is tightly coupled with respiratory metabolism at multiple levels[17,18,19,20,21]. Phosphorus is a vital component of plants’ nucleic acids and many proteins, including enzymes involved in the respiratory release of energy contained in sugars and the regulation of numerous metabolic pathways[24]. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that plants’ phosphorus contents are linked to their respiration rates through a scaling relationship similar to that observed for their nitrogen contents[12,22,23,30]. Whether the hypothetical relationship (if present), is similar to that between nitrogen and respiration rates, we simultaneously measured the plants’ nitrogen contents
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