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by Imnimo 13 days ago
This reminds me also of this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1115585109

"The allocation of all metabolic resources to maintenance purposes limits the size of the smallest prokaryotes and largest unicellular eukaryotes, whereas an inability to meet the ever-increasing biosynthesis rates limits the largest prokaryotes and smallest unicellular eukaryotes. Metabolic constraints for larger eukaryotes are relieved by alternative reproductive strategies and multicellularity."

1 comments

That framing makes the article feel even more interesting, because it's not just "cells are small because diffusion gets slow". There's also an energy budget behind it