Scaling Laws and Performance Trade-offs for Collective Transport

Motor-driven intracellular transport of organelles, vesicles, and other molecular cargo is a highly collective process. An individual cargo is often pulled by a team of transport motors, with numbers ranging from only a few to over 200. We explore the behaviour of these systems using a stochastic model for motordriven transport of molecular cargo by N motors which we solve analytically. We investigate the Ndependence of important quantities such as the velocity, precision of forward progress, energy flows between different system components, and efficiency; these properties obey simple scaling laws with N in two opposing regimes. Finally, we explore performance bounds and trade-offs as N is varied, providing insight into how different numbers of motors might be well-matched to different types of systems depending on which performance metrics are prioritized.