Costs of accuracy determined by a maximal growth rate constraint

The present study is best understood as an extension and critique of two schools of thought. The first is that of Malloe and his students, among whom we number ourselves. It is to Maaloe that we are indebted for the idea that logarithmically growing bacteria assemble and use tibosomes in amounts that are optimally adjusted to yield the maximal growth rates supported by different media. Her, we begin our analysis by applying this optimization priciple to all the components of a logarithmically growing system. Our objective is to use the growth optimization constraint as a tool to explore the physiological limits on the accuracy of gene expression. This brings us to our second source of inspiration, which is Orgel's (1963) conception of a problem that Ninio (1982) has referred to as the ‘great error loop’.