Thermodynamic Basis of Molecular Diffusion through Cyanobacterial Septal Junctions

A recent paper published by Nieves-Morión and colleagues proposes that the intercellular transfer of small molecules in heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria (calcein, 5-carboxyfluorescein [5-CF], and esculin) is mediated by simple diffusion based on the Q 10 values of the kinetics (1).In this letter, we show our analysis of their results to provide a thermodynamic basis of the kinetics.We obtained rate constant values of the intercellular transfer for those molecules from Fig. 1 of the original paper (1) using the ImageJ program (https://imagej.nih.gov/ ij/).We calculated molar free energy of activation (ΔG a °) for each molecule at each temperature (T) using the Eyring equation (equation 1) from the corresponding rate constant (k):

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