Dynamic Energy Budget

Dynamic Energy Budget

The Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory aims to identify simple quantitative rules for the organization of metabolism of individual organisms that can be understood from basic first principles. The word "dynamic" refers to the life cycle perspective of the theory, where the budget changes dynamically over time.

Cornerstones of the theory are:

• conservation of mass, energy and time,
• relationships between surface area and volume
• stoichiometric constraints on production
• organisational uncoupling of metabolic modules
• strong and weak homeostasis
• substrate(s) from the environment is/are first converted to reserve(s) before being used for further metabolism

They are essential to understand evolution of metabolic organisation since the origin of life.

DEB theory delineates reserves, as separate from structure. Reserves are synthesized from environmental substrates (food) for use by the metabolism for the purpose of somatic maintenance (including protein turnover, maintenance of concentration gradients across membranes, activity and other types of work), growth (increase of structural mass), maturity maintenance (installation of regulation systems, preparation for reproduction, maintenance of defense systems, such as the immune system), maturation (increase of the state of maturity) and reproduction. This organizational position of reserve creates a rather constant internal chemical environment, with only an indirect coupling with the extra-organismal environment. Reserves as well as structure are taken to be generalised compounds, i.e. mixtures of a large number of compounds, which do not change in composition. The latter requirement is called the strong homeostasis assumption. Polymers (carbohydrates, proteins, ribosomal RNA) and lipids form the main bulk of reserves and of structure.

Some reasons for including reserve are to give an explanation for:

1. the metabolic memory; changes in food (substrate) availability affect production (growth or reproduction) with some delay. Growth continues for some time during starvation; embryo development is fueled by reserves
2. the composition of biomass depends on growth rate. With two components (reserves and structure) particular changes in composition can be captured. More complex changes require several reserves, as is required for autotrophs.
3. the body size scaling of life history parameters. The specific respiration rate decreases with (maximum) body size between species because large bodied species have relatively more reserve. Many other life history parameters directly or indirectly relate to respiration.
4. the observed respiration patterns, which reflect the use of energy. Freshly laid eggs hardly respire, but their respiratory rates increase during development while egg weight decreases. After hatching, however, the respiration rate further increases, while the weight now also increases
5. all mass fluxes are linear combinations of assimilation, dissipation and growth. If reserves are omitted, there is not enough flexibility to capture product formation and explain indirect calorimetry.

The standard model quantifies the metabolism of isomorphs with 1 reserve and 1 structure that feeds on one type of food with a constant composition. The rules for the standard model for reproducing multicellulars, and modified for dividing unicellulars, are: