Energetic scaling in microbial growth_data

Microbial growth is a clear example of organization and structure arising in non-equilibrium conditions. Due to the complexity of the microbial metabolic network, elucidating the fundamental principles governing microbial growth remains a challenge. Here leveraging decades of experimental data on growth of microbial isolates, we study in depth the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of microbial growth to shed light on the relation between mass and energy constraints on growth. Our results show that there exist universal scaling laws relating the thermodynamic efficiency of microbial growth to the electron donor uptake rate and to the growth yield, which tightly couple mass and energy conversion in microbial growth. This resource contains an excel file with original data from Smeaton and Van Cappellen (2018) and the thermodynamic calculations for the article associated to this resource, and a Mathematica code used for drawing the Figures.