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Extending physiological growth-law frameworks to ecological interactions

Develop a quantitative framework that extends physiological growth-law and proteome-allocation models to ecologically interacting organisms, characterizing how interspecies interactions, competition, and cross-feeding shape and are shaped by cellular resource allocation.

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Background

The authors argue that growth-law models, originally focused on isolated populations, should account for the ecological context where organisms interact and transform their environments.

This challenge requires integrating consumer-resource dynamics and cooperative interactions (e.g., cross-feeding) with proteome allocation to predict community behavior.

References

Many open questions remain, e.g.: Which regulatory mechanisms determine responses in fluctuating or stressful environments? To what extent are growth laws conserved across organisms? Can we integrate growth laws for population averages with single-cell observations to uncover new complexities? Can the framework developed for describing physiology be extended to ecologically interacting organisms? What are the evolutionary drivers behind these laws, and what constraints do they impose? We believe these questions will drive many of the future advances in quantitative biology.

— The Hands-On Growth Laws Theory Cookbook (2507.19194 - Droghetti et al., 25 Jul 2025) in Section 1, A Brief Introduction to Growth laws (Where is the frontier?)