  The interior of a living cell is an active, fluctuating, and crowded
environment. Yet, it maintains a high level of coherent organization, which is
readily apparent in the intracellular transport network. Membrane-bound
compartments called endosomes play a key role in carrying cargo, in conjunction
with myriad components including cargo adaptor proteins, membrane sculptors,
motor proteins, and the cytoskeleton. These components coordinate to
effectively navigate the crowded cell interior and transport cargo to specific
intracellular locations, even though the underlying protein interactions and
enzymatic reactions exhibit stochastic behavior. A major challenge is to
measure, analyze, and understand how, despite the inherent stochasticity of the
constituent processes, the collective outcomes show an emergent spatiotemporal
order that is precise and robust. This review focuses on this intriguing
dichotomy, providing insights into the known mechanisms of noise suppression
and noise utilization in intracellular transport processes, and also identifies
opportunities for future inquiry.
