BPS2026 – Energetics of biological systems

Living biological systems are metabolically active, open systems that constantly exchange matter and energy with their environment. At the core of this lies cellular metabolism, an interconnected network of chemical reactions that transforms environmental nutrients into the mass and free energy that support homeostasis, growth, and development. Because the matter and energy fluxes sustained by metabolism keep cells far from thermodynamic equilibrium, it has long been speculated that energy dissipation poses essential constraints to cellular growth, homeostasis, and organismal development. Here, I will discuss our findings, which employ a data-driven approach to infer the thermodynamics of unicellular microbes across the domains of life. This is achieved by parsing existing data from more than 400 instances of balanced unicellular growth and analyzing them using a minimal non-equilibrium thermodynamics framework. I will elaborate on combining this framework with calorimetric heat dissipation measurements, perturbations, imaging, and metabolomics to determine the energetics driving mammalian cell growth and metazoan embryonic development.