Dendritic trafficking faces physiologically critical speed-precision tradeoffs

Nervous system function requires intracellular transport of channels, receptors, mRNAs, and other cargo throughout complex neuronal morphologies. Local signals such as synaptic input can regulate cargo trafficking, motivating the leading conceptual model of neuron-wide transport, sometimes called the \"sushi-belt model\" (Doyle and Kiebler, 2011). Current theories and experiments are based on this model, yet its predictions are not rigorously understood. We formalized the sushi belt model mathematically, showing how it can achieve arbitrarily complex spatial distributions of cargo in reconstructed morphologies. However, the model also predicts an unavoidable, morphology dependent tradeoff be