Fig 3. Intuition behind the proof of Theorem 4.

As μ is increased, the polytope ${\mathcal{P}}_{\mathit{x},\mu }$ cuts through the ribosome allocation constraint $\left|\mathit{\alpha }\right|={\sum }_{i=1}^{n+1}{\alpha }_i\le \lambda$, with |α| = λ shown in blue. Exactly at the maximal growth rate, the intersection of the polytope with |α| = λ is reduced to one vertex (black dot), i.e., one EGS.