Toward a general understanding of thermal performance curves in biology
Author(s)
Pawar, Samraat
Kontopoulos, Dimitrios-Georgios
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Temperature profoundly influences biological processes at all scales, from enzyme kinetics to ecosystem-level metabolism. Despite the enormous physiological diversity of life on Earth—from unicellular microbes to plants and animals—there is a remarkable similarity in how individual-level traits (e.g., metabolic rate, locomotion, growth rate) respond to temperature (1–3). These relationships are captured by thermal performance curves (TPCs), which describe how the rate or magnitude of a biological trait varies continuously with temperature (2, 4). TPCs are typically unimodal and left-skewed (Fig. 1), rising in an Arrhenius-like (that is, exponentially) manner with temperature up to an optimum and then declining steeply beyond a critical upper threshold (5, 6). In their new study, Arnoldi et al. (7) provide a strikingly general explanation for this ubiquitous curve shape, showing that the diversity of mechanistic TPC models and empirical data can be unified under a single, mathematically derived “Universal Thermal Performance Curve” (UTPC).
Date Issued
2025-12-23
Date Acceptance
2025-11-06
Citation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025, 122 (51)
ISSN
0027-8424
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume
122
Issue
51
Copyright Statement
© 2025 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/41397143
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
United States
Article Number
e2528528122
Date Publish Online
2025-12-15