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

Motor-driven intracellular transport of organelles, vesicles, and other cargo is accomplished by teams of transport motors, with numbers ranging from only a few to several hundred. Using stochastic thermodynamics, we derive a series of bounds that constrain the performance (including velocity, precision, and efficiency) of a broad class of these collective transport systems for any number of motors. We explore a simple stochastic collective-transport model that exactly saturates the derived Pareto frontiers. This model is analytically tractable, giving simple functional forms for the performance metrics as a function of motor number. The resulting trade-offs point to design principles governing functional collections of transport motors in different contexts.