302 | Chris Kempes on the Biophysics of Evolution

1846.911 - 1870.587 Chris Kempes

So you start to look more and more like a cell that can only repair itself. It actually can barely grow any new stuff for replication. And this space constraint and this maintenance constraint, where maintenance metabolism becomes the whole metabolism, both happen at basically the same tiny cell size. And so we think it's this dual constraint that sets the smallest possible bacteria.