In this section
@article{Pawar:2025:10.1073/pnas.2528528122,
author = {Pawar, S and Kontopoulos, D-G},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.2528528122},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
title = {Toward a general understanding of thermal performance curves in biology},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2528528122},
volume = {122},
year = {2025}
}
TY - JOUR
AB - 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).
AU - Pawar,S
AU - Kontopoulos,D-G
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2528528122
PY - 2025///
SN - 0027-8424
TI - Toward a general understanding of thermal performance curves in biology
T2 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2528528122
UR - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2528528122
VL - 122
ER -
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