  DNA replication in Xenopus laevis is extremely reliable, failing to complete
before cell division no more than once in 10,000 times; yet replication origins
sites are located and initiated stochastically. Using a model based on 1d
theories of nucleation and growth and using concepts from extreme-value
statistics, we derive the distribution of replication times given a particular
initiation function. We show that the experimentally observed initiation
strategy for Xenopus laevis meets the reliability constraint and is close to
the one that requires the fewest resources of a cell.
