T he concept of scaling is now well established, and allometric analysis has become a standard tool for quantitative comparison of features between organisms of differing body size. This technique has been applied with great success in the field of comparative physiology, notably to respiratory physiology of mammals and of the avian egg, and the major findings have been succinctly reviewed by K...

This study was conducted to comprehensively survey the available literature on intravenous pharmacokinetic parameters in the rat, dog, monkey, and human, and to compare common methods for extrapolation of clearance, to identify the most appropriate species to use in pharmacokinetic lead optimization, and to ascertain whether adequate prospective measures of predictive success are currently avai...

We investigated allocation to roots, stems and leaves of 27 species of herbaceous clonal plants grown at two nutrient levels. Allocation was analyzed as biomass ratios and also allometrically. As in other studies, the fraction of biomass in stems and, to a lesser extent, in leaves, was usually higher in the high-nutrient treatment than in the low-nutrient treatment, and the fraction of biomass ...

Seed plants vary tremendously in size and morphology; however, variation and covariation in plant traits may be governed, at least in part, by universal biophysical laws and biological constants. Metabolic scaling theory (MST) posits that whole-organismal metabolism and growth rate are under stabilizing selection that minimizes the scaling of hydrodynamic resistance and maximizes the scaling of...

‘In the statistics of today, transformations . . . [aid] in the analysis of data by bending the data nearer the Procrustean bed of the assumptions underlying conventional analyses’ (Tukey, 1957). This letter is in response to Cawley & Janacek (2010), who take exception with our critique of a widely used procedure for estimating bodymass of dinosaurs and other giant animals in extinct lineages (...

Metabolism of living organisms is a foundation of life. The metabolic rate (energy production per unit time) increases slower than organisms' mass. When this phenomenon is considered across different species, it is called interspecific allometric scaling, whose causes are unknown. We argue that the cause of interspecific allometric scaling is the total effect of physiological and adaptation mec...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Previous work has shown that the entire photosynthetic light response curve, based on both Mitscherlich and Michaelis-Menten functions, could be predicted in an interspecific context through allometric relations linking the parameters of these functions to two static leaf traits: leaf nitrogen (N) content and leaf mass per area (LMA). This paper describes to what extent thes...

A long-standing question in developmental biology is how do growing and developing animals achieve form and then maintain it. We have revealed a critical transition in growth control during zebrafish caudal fin development, wherein a switch from allometric to isometric growth occurs. This morphological transition led us to hypothesize additional physiological changes in growth control pathways....

The traditional method for normalizing quantitative strength data is to divide force or torque by body mass. We have previously shown that this method is not appropriate for able-bodied children and young adults and that normalization using allometric scaling is more effective. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of applying existing normalization equations for lo...