Abstract
Metabolic rate and lifespan are important biological parameters that are studied in a wide range of research fields. They are known to correlate with body mass, but their association with gene (protein) functions is poorly understood. In this study, we collected data on the metabolic rate and lifespan of various organisms and investigated the relationship of these parameters with their genomes. We showed that the proportion of genes in a functional category, but not genome size, was correlated with mass-specific metabolic rate and maximal lifespan. In particular, the proportion of genes in oxic reactions (which occur in the presence of oxygen) was significantly associated with these two biological parameters. Additionally, we found that temperature, taxonomy, and mode-of-life traits had little effect on the observed associations. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering the biological functions of genes when investigating the relationships between genome, metabolic rate, and lifespan. Moreover, this provides further insights into these relationships, and may be useful for estimating metabolic rate and lifespan in individuals and the ecosystem using a combination of body mass measurements and genomic data.
Highlights
Genomic information may reflect metabolic rate because metabolic networks, which are expected to determine metabolic rate, are encoded in the genome[1,2]
Genes related to oxic reactions or oxic metabolism[24,25], which are involved in processes that occur in the presence of oxygen, may be useful for determining metabolic rate because they are expected to be involved in oxygen consumption
A previous study[17], Starostová et al reported a limited effect of genome size, defined as the C-value, on mass-specific rate in eyelid geckos
Summary
Genomic information may reflect metabolic rate because metabolic networks, which are expected to determine metabolic rate, are encoded in the genome[1,2]. Kozłowski et al.[16] and Starostová et al.[17] reported that mass-specific metabolic rate is affected by cellular mass rather than by genome size or C-value (i.e., the amount of DNA in pg) in eyelid geckos. This may be because genome size has a weak correlation with cellular mass[13]. We collected data on metabolic rate and lifespan from published literature, selecting data from species for which a complete sequenced genome was available (see Methods) Using these data, we evaluated the usefulness of functional categories of genes for determining metabolic rate and lifespan
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