  We quantify the amount of regulation required to control growth in living
cells by a Maximum Entropy approach to the space of underlying metabolic states
described by genome-scale models. Results obtained for E. coli and human cells
are consistent with experiments and point to different regulatory strategies by
which growth can be fostered or repressed. Moreover we explicitly connect the
`inverse temperature' that controls MaxEnt distributions to the growth
dynamics, showing that the initial size of a colony may be crucial in
determining how an exponentially growing population organizes the phenotypic
space.
