Collaborative Research: RoL: The rules of life were made to be broken - Connecting physiology, evolutionary ecology, and mathematics to identify a Growth Rate Rule.

Collaborative Research: RoL: The rules of life were made to be broken - Connecting physiology, evolutionary ecology, and mathematics to identify a Growth Rate Rule. Collaborative Research: RoL: The rules of life were made to be broken - Connecting physiology, evolutionary ecology, and mathematics to identify a Growth Rate Rule. Are there fundamental rules that link the biochemical properties of cells to dynamical processes in ecosystems? This project will use the foundation of ecological / biological stoichiometry to assess if the tripartite connections among growth rate, RNA allocation, and carbon:nitrogen:phosphorus stoichiometry constitute a Rule of Life (the Growth Rate Rule, GRR) and to evaluate conditions under which the GRR might be broken. The project will evaluate the GRR with intensive physiological, evolutionary, and ecological work on three model organisms that represent key ecological functional groups: Pseudomonas putida (chemoheterotrophic decomposer), the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (photoautotroph), and the crustacean Daphnia pulex (primary consumer / herbivore). Our proposed work crosses biochemical, cellular, physiological, and ecological scales and thus encompasses much of the NSF BIO directorate (DEB, IOS, MCB). Furthermore, given the intimate connections between the proposed experimental work and development of novel approaches in applied mathematics, our project also reaches across NSF to the MPS directorate.