Pareto-optimal bugs: do power-yield trade-offs scale from individual microorganisms to microbial communities?

The framings of thermodynamics and empirical observations have led to various theories of how biological systems emerge across different scales of complexity. Power-yield trade-offs span scales from electron transport chains to whole organisms that have been observed to adapt metabolism and adjust their trade-offs in a Pareto efficient manner. Signatures of power-yield trade-offs and strategies for exergy flows exist in microbial genomes, providing opportunities to bridge systems biology, thermodynamics, ecology and evolution. While these principles of power-yield trade-offs have been evaluated for individual microorganisms, to date there are few examples of their application to microbiomes. A natural extension to these theories and observations thus leads us to question how power-yield trade-offs scale from individual microorganisms to microbial communities.