Vazquez, A.

Living organisms are defined by self-replication and self-confinement. We expect these two properties to shape the metabolic capabilities of cells. Here I demonstrate that the maximum growth rate of cells is, in a first approximation, the geometric mean between the maximum rate of ribosome self-replication and the maximum rate of macromolecular synthesis allowed by the interior volume defined by the cell membrane. I also show how these constraints are buried into the biomass compositions of flux balance models.