Performance scaling and trade-offs for collective motor-driven transport

Abstract

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 several hundred. We explore the behavior of these systems using a stochastic model for transport of molecular cargo by an arbitrary number N of motors obeying linear Langevin dynamics, finding analytic solutions for the N -dependence of the velocity, precision of forward progress, energy flows between different system components, and efficiency. In two opposing regimes, we show that these properties obey simple scaling laws with N . Finally, we explore trade-offs between performance metrics as N is varied, providing insight into how different numbers of motors might be well-matched to distinct contexts where different performance metrics are prioritized.

Keywords

• molecular motors
• collective transport
• Langevin equation
• stochastic thermodynamics
• fluctuations