Figure 5.

As unnecessary classes are lost, one unnecessary class must become highly abundant to maintain the size of the kinetoplast, i.e., 10,000 minicircles. This is because the 15 necessary classes are restricted to a maximum of only 200 copies. Initially all classes have a copy number of 170, and 55 classes are unnecessary and 15 are necessary. The red line shows the cumulative frequency of all unnecessary classes, the black line the cumulative frequency of all necessary classes, and the green line the frequency of the most abundant class at any given time.