Fugg Around With Sheeple Quantum Biology, But You Not Gonna Phug With Mine...,
medical-net | Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.
In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.
Proton tunneling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton's re-appearance nearby.
The research team found that atoms of hydrogen, which are very light, provide the bonds that hold the two strands of the DNA's double helix together and can, under certain conditions, behave like spread-out waves that can exist in multiple locations at once, thanks to proton tunneling. This leads to these atoms occasionally being found on the wrong strand of DNA, leading to mutations.
Although these mutations' lifetime is short, the team from Surrey has revealed that they can still survive the DNA replication mechanism inside cells and could potentially have health consequences.
Dr Marco Sacchi, the project lead and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, said: "Many have long suspected that the quantum world - which is weird, counter-intuitive and wonderful - plays a role in life as we know it. While the idea that something can be present in two places at the same time might be absurd to many of us, this happens all the time in the quantum world, and our study confirms that quantum tunneling also happens in DNA at room temperature."
There is still a long and exciting road ahead of us to understand how biological processes work on the subatomic level, but our study - and countless others over the recent years - have confirmed quantum mechanics are at play. In the future, we are hoping to investigate how tautomers produced by quantum tunneling can propagate and generate genetic mutations."
Louie Slocombe, PhD Student, Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre and Study Co-Author
Jim Al-Khalili, a co-author of the study and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Surrey, said: "It has been thrilling to work with this group of young, diverse and talented thinkers - made up of a broad coalition of the scientific world. This work cements quantum biology as the most exciting field of scientific research in the 21st century."
mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids Are An ABOMINATION To The Root Of Life Itself
discovermagazine | With photosynthesis, scientists show for the first time that there are quantum effects in living systems. This could lead to better solar panels, energy storage or even quantum computers. (Credit: Shutterstock) We all probably learned about photosynthesis, how plants turn sunlight into energy, in school. It might seem, therefore, that we figured out this bit of the world. But scientists are still learning new things about even the most basic stuff (see also the sun and moon), and photosynthesis is no different. In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. Not only will it help us better understand plants, sunlight and everything in between, but it could also mean cool new tech in the future.
The Quantum Conundrum
First, let’s back up. While photosynthesis may be taught in classrooms the world over, quantum mechanics is a bit less popular, in part because it’s so weird. Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman once said, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." It’s so impenetrable to non-experts that the same metaphors come up whenever someone tries to explain it. You might have heard of Schrödinger's Cat, which is both alive and dead at the same time thanks to quantum weirdness — in particular, because electrons can be in two states at the same time. It’s only when we observe the system that the weirdness collapses and reality “picks” one state: the cat’s actually alive (or dead), the electron’s actually at this end of the room (or that end). But quantum effects are typically limited to the very small, and only really observable in perfect, laboratory conditions. A living being, with its wet, messy systems, would be a tough place to find some quantum weirdness lurking — and yet we have.
Molecular Madness
Scientists zoomed in on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex, a key component of green sulfur bacteria's machinery for photosynthesis. It’s been a historical favorite for such research because we’ve long known its structure and it's fairly easy to work with. Previous experiments had seemed to show light-sensitive molecules in this area in two different states at the same time — that’s quantum weirdness — but the effect lasted more than 1 picosecond, which is much longer than expected. This new study shows that it was really just regular vibrations in the molecules, nothing quantum about it. But researchers have been excited about the possibilities of quantum biology for years, so having disproved the earlier experiments, the authors wanted to find some new evidence of their own. “We wondered if we might be able to observe that Schrödinger cat situation,” says co-author Thomas la Cour Jansen in a press release. And observe it they did! With a technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, researchers saw molecules in simultaneous excited states — quantum weirdness akin to a cat being alive and dead at the same time. What’s more, the effect lasted exactly as long as theories predicted it, suggesting this evidence of quantum biology will last. As the authors succinctly put it, “Thus, our measurements provide an unambiguous experimental observation of excited-state vibronic coherence in the FMO complex.” What could be simpler? The results shed light (haha) on how to harvest energy from light, and the team thinks they’re “generally applicable” to a variety of systems, living and non-living alike. This means it could result in engineering benefits such as better solar panels, energy storage or even quantum computers. And, of course, updated textbooks for tomorrow’s lessons on photosynthesis.
I Don't Think Of Quantum Biology As A Metaphor...,
quantamagazine | It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical. And until the 20th century, everyone assumed that the classical laws of physics devised by Isaac Newton and others — according to which objects have well-defined positions and properties at all times — would work at every scale. But Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and their contemporaries discovered that down among atoms and subatomic particles, this concreteness dissolves into a soup of possibilities. An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position, for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in various places. The vexing question then becomes: How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world?
Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the “quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that there’s a sudden switch between them. Over the past several decades, researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding environment.
One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.
This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift between quantum and classical physics.
Only recently, however, has quantum Darwinism been put to the experimental test. Three research groups, working independently in Italy, China and Germany, have looked for the telltale signature of the natural selection process by which information about a quantum system gets repeatedly imprinted on various controlled environments. These tests are rudimentary, and experts say there’s still much more to be done before we can feel sure that QD provides the right picture of how our concrete reality condenses from the multiple options that quantum mechanics offers. Yet so far, the theory checks out.
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