Ultraviolet Super Radiance in Biological Architectures

hi everyone I'm Dr B and I'm here to talk to you today about some of the results of my latest article ultraviolet super Radiance from Mega networks of trpt toan in biological architectures now this work has received a lot of attention lately with over 20,000 article views since the article came out last month and an ALT metric score of 175 based on follow-up reports and news articles blogs on Facebook and X formerly known as Twitter as well as Reddit and a number of videos that have been posted about the contest and some of the implications even perhaps for Consciousness so I decided based on the questions I've received that it would be a great opportunity for me to record a video of my own to talk about the paper and some of its implications this talk is titled Quantum effects in microt tual super Radiance and the sensory motor response again I'm Dr Nathan Babcock I'm a theoretical physicist specializing Quantum biology and I decided to prepared this video to answer a number of questions and to clarify some things based on a number of comments and questions that I have received about the paper so far so let's begin what are microtubules first of all microtubules are structures found in cells made of the globular protein tubulin microtubules are polymers in the cytoskeleton the cytoskeleton is the skeleton of the cell made up of actin and intermediate f Els and the microtubule organizing Center found near the center of the cell near the nuclei of the cell controls the overall structure of the cytoskeleton in animal cells tryptophan is an amino acid it's a molecule found in most proteins and it is crucial for the structure of microtubules we have analyzed a number of networks of tryptophan the uh chromophor fluorescent pigment of the protein and looking at the structures we're able to see that the actual tryptophan residues uh are organized in interesting geometrical networks with significance for their fluorescence properties as well now this work is motivated by previous studies of microt tual exons these are electronic excitations uh that Studies have shown can actually form in microtubules they're believed to be generated by reactive oxygen species these are um molecules of oxygen that have reactive properties when they interact with microtubules uh they can create what is known as Ultra weak Photon emissions these are very weak light emissions from the microtubules often just only a single photon is emitted during these processes now Ross that is to say reactive oxygen species induced exons are believed to propagate through the microtubules and this kind of quantum transfer is understood to be significant in tubulin where microt tual networks May transfer these Ross induced exiton and in fact the photon energy there that could be relevant for cell signaling so these kind of implications that were published in the Journal of photo chemistry and photobiology prompted us to follow up to see if we could learn a little bit more about the scale SC of the kind of excitons these uh Optical frequency excitations of the microtubules and what they could be doing what is their significance there so we carried out a number of simulations of an effect called super Radiance super Radiance is an effect that can occur in groups of fluorescent pigments these chromophores can not just uh produce light on their own but can interact collectively to produce a kind of collective excitation and the result is that of this is that the radiant properties can then become uh enhan and that they can emit at a faster rate the image of the microtubule shown in this slide shows you the effect of the delocalization the um spreading out of a single exiton over the entire length of a microt tual areas where the exiton is most populated are shown in red and the Lesser populations are shown in blue but you have an intermediate level of population you can see in green that stretches along the entire length of the microt tual and this is the kind of coherent excitation that Quantum physicists like myself are often interested in when we look at a single tubent spiral uh containing 13 uh tubulin dimers uh this is the basic element of a microtubule that is stacked up over and over again to produce the kind of tubular structure we've seen already on previous slides uh what can happen is if now the tryptophan networks inside these Spirals and Columns of these spirals the tube itself uh are excited we get this Collective emission enhancement now we represent this using using the capital letter gamma to depict the collective emitter rate and the lowercase gamma to depict the single emitter rate when we take the ratio of the collective emitter rate to the single emitter rate we get an impression of the enhancement and if you look at the single spiral enhancement when we collect the tryptophan together all from the tubulin arranged in a single spiral we see perhaps an order of magnitude enhancement but if we now line up up 99 of these spirals to create a lengthy tube we can see a real significant super Radiance effect approaching 600 so this is more than two orders of magnitude uh increase in the emitter rate based on the collective enhancement versus the rate of a single emitter alone we continued this study to look at larger and larger structures that are built out of microt tual in the cell uh these are kind of structures are sometimes known as the ultra structure of the cell and looking at a Centrio this is part of the microt tual organizing center of the cell we found that collections of microtubules organized in the U radial pattern that you can see on this slide uh we can actually in principle at least achieve enhancements of three or 4,000 of The Collector Collective emitter rate over the single emitter rate what became interesting in our work was we began to look at the impact of disorder on the system of course uh physicists like to look at idealized systems but real life is never quite as ideal as we might like and so we began to introduce disorder into our simulations of the trip toan Network and what we found was uh very promising because as we increased the size of the microt tual arrangement the size of the tryptophan Network what we found was that it became more resistant to disorder that the super radiant effect actually became more robust against disorder as the size of the network increased now we can't necessarily expect that just increasing the size of the network is going to somehow make it more resistant to disorderly effects but that is what we found in this study uh where we had a significant Improvement in the resistance to the disorder term W shown on the horizontal axis of this slide as we increased the size of the cental the microt tual arrangement shown here um increasing its length from 64 nanometers all the way up to 256 nanometers now what's most important is that for a disorder parameter of 200 inverse centimeters shown in the inverse of the slide we still see a significant potential super radiant enhancement this disorder parameter is comparable to the amount of disorder you might see at thermal temperatures a realistic kind of room temperature or physiological temperatures and the largest cental we studied still showed at least an order of magnitude Improvement in the super radiant effect demonstrating that at the right time scales these kind of effects still can be found in potentially living cells we followed up on these kind of studies numerical studies with actual experimental work where we looked at the fluorescence and the absorption spectra of the tryptophan networks uh shall we say an individual tryptophan molecules shown in the orange curves of this slide as well as in individual tubulin diers and whole microtubules um which are shown in green and blue respectively now what is something interesting to see here is the Stoke shift that's the gap appap between the fluoresence peak and the absorption Peak changes as we go from Individual tryptophan molecules to tubuland dimers and whole microtubules indicating that the actual geometric structure of these systems does have a significant effect on the spectral properties of the uh fluorescence in these systems again reinforcing the idea that the actual Quantum effects that we numerically are having a legitimate impact in our actual laboratory experiments uh further experiments that we talk about in the Journal of physical chemistry B article that I showed at the beginning of this talk uh showed enhancements in the quantum yield uh that would be hard to explain in microtubules without some kind of fluoresence enhancement effect leading us to conclude that indeed even at normal laboratory room temperatures uh that the actual super radiant effect that we predict from our numerics is providing an enhancement in microtubules in normal ambient conditions why is this significant well light and these reactive oxygen species these reactive forms of the oxygen molecule have an impact on microtubular structure and their Dynamics something import important is that the Stoke shift uh about 100 pardon me 1,200 nanometers or one electron volt to a physicist is comparable to the energy that's already stored in microtubules from their fuel source uh GTP to GDP conversion which is about a fifth of an electron volt um we know that tubulin absorbs and REITs ultraviolet energy capturing energy in the near infrared around this frequency range and that the Stoke shift is significantly reduced in tubulin so it shows us that the right kind of energies uh both uh in the ground to singlet transition of the reactive oxygen species in the transition from GTP to GDP the fuel source of the microtubules and um the actual uh vibrations themselves in the infrared spectrum of the mic microt tual are all at the same uh wavelength no pun intended they their frequ their frequencies are comparable showing that these systems uh these aspects of the systems all can interact now why this is important is that when we look at uh flower petal cells as you show can see here in the electron microscopy images shown that if you look at the control petal cells uh these are aerod opsis flower petal cells uh that have been and uh not treated at all they have kind of a conical shape as opposed to flower petal cells that are treated with reactive oxygen species uh they become more bubish shown uh to the lower right of the two figures here and now this is important because uh we know that microtubules can also be randomized or fragmented uh even depolarized under UV light and that similar effects happen when they're exposed to reactive oxygen species U what's more is that microt growth Inhibitors uh that have been uh studied to in experiments exploring the actual properties of microt tual growth are also tryptophan fluorescence quenchers uh they dampen out the tryptophan fluorescence and that though both UV light and reactive oxygen species can produce the same kind of swelling in these plant cells due to their interaction with the microt tual network itself microtubules also mod monitor reactive oxygen species they're sensors of the cells indicating a highly intertwined uh effects between tryptophan fluorescence uh absorption and reactive oxygen species mediated excitations in these cells which again control both the uh structure Dynamics and ultimately the growth of the microt tuum netw works in these cells This is highly important because microtubules aren't just structure uh structural components they're active sensor systems in the cell uh there's a lot of research that has been shown to indicate that microtubules sense structural tension uh sense stress uh redo chemistry and as I mentioned now light in the cell now they're not just passive sensors they're Active Components and the hydris of GTP that is guanosine triphosphate uh dri phonon vibrations these are just mechanical vibrations in the microt tual now it was proposed in 2010 that microtubules could undergo a kind of mode locking effect locking in some modes of these vibrations while locking out others and this kind of mode locking or phase locking effect is a significant one that's often used in Quantum Optics Laboratories to create Ultra fast laser pulses so this is a significant kind of effect to look for and in fact future studies um well this is 2021 now uh showed that microtubules that exhibit coherent motions and that they can act as Optical cavities and further studies from 2022 have shown that actually there is electron phonon coupling that is coupling between the electronic the excited exiton States and the phonon vibrational states to create what's known as a phop poon so there's a lot of evidence to show that there are the kind of typical Quantum optic effects that you would look for in a Quantum Optics lab in the microt tual systems themselves so this brings us to the idea of microtubules not just as structural elements and sensors but as real actuators uh sensory motor integrators or Governors as they used to say in the old days and they are vital to cell structure cell division cell motility and sensing uh as I mentioned before microtubules sense stress in Plants uh they can sense and respond to Cellular tension and they can actually enact proprioceptive control that is the cell's sense of its environment and this kind of cellular perception then proceeds to control cell morphology similar to the morphological changes in the flower petal cells that I showed on a pre previous slide now given the fact that microtubules are also good light Harvest ERS this really ties together a picture of microtubules as sensory motor integrators of mechanical Optical and chemical information inside and around the cell this is significant in light of the discovery of super Radiance because of the numerous U properties of super Radiance that have been proposed to be valuable to Quantum Computing that is to say Quantum information processing ing applications so there's a number of unrelated works on super Radiance that have shown that super Radiance can be used to control uh and produce individual photons for non-classical light sources uh to generate correlative photons and to produce even so-called super radiant lasers a new type of laser that is different from the underlying physics of the lasers we have in our laser pointers or in our CD players now even more importantly that uh super Radiance can now be used to control dissipative Dynamics and this is of crucial importance for Quantum information processing applications where the decoherence of the system needs to be controlled in order to prevent the system from losing the phase coherence which is so crucial to its operation as a Quantum information processing device um now the use of the control of dissipative Dynamics um can also be used to create so-called dark States in fact in whenever you create a super radiant State a short-lived fast emitting State you also create a so-called subradiant state or dark state which is a slow emitting state which now can be used for a kind of quantum memory in effect now none of these kind of uh more Quantum information processing effects have been showed conclusively yet in microt tubies but what is important to understand is that the super Radiance is a Hallmark of all of these effects and so when we go look at cells for super Radiance and cells where we already know they have very important uh sensory motor processing functions it's very interesting now to consider that the natural consequences of super radiant could be involved in cellular processing as well does this mean that there is quantum Computing in the brain for those who are familiar with Neurology or Neuroscience you may be aware that microtubules are a very important part of neurons the highest proportion of microt tubies in the body are found in the brain so some have speculated that the brain could if it has these Quantum effects in microtubules be a quantum computer people have asked me Dr B what do you think of this and I would say not exactly I mean I agree all eukaryotic cells contain microtubules and microtubules are most abundant in nerves and certainly microtubular networks are vastly complex as you see in the image of this cell uh we can see the nucleus in blue and the microt tual network in green and you can clearly see the kind of uh Center microt tual organizing Center uh that organizes the microt tual network from near the nucleus in the cell so clearly there's very important processing going on structural chemical sensory motor processing going on in the cell um almost certainly some kind of underlying Quantum effects driving these kind of properties uh but that doesn't necessarily allow us to just jump to the conclusion that the cell is somehow a quantum computer uh the way computer scientists think of it at least so what does this mean for Quantum Consciousness research there's been much said about Quantum Consciousness research in light of microt tual discoveries the issue with speculating on the role of these biophysical effects for Consciousness research is that Consciousness research right now is philosophy not physics if you look up the definition of Consciousness in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy uh we can see that perhaps no aspect of the mind is more familiar or more puzzling than Consciousness and the conscious experience now this is problematic for doing science because currently there is no agreed upon theory of what Consciousness actually is or even necessarily how to study it so given that Consciousness research is currently at the level of philosophical inquiry it presents challenges for actually doing hard science related to investigations of Consciousness now that doesn't rule out scientific Consciousness research but it presents problems for the clarity of that research when we think of Consciousness there's a number of different definitions that come to mind there's a so-called kind of ladder of Consciousness going from the most primitive forms of Consciousness which is simply uh in presented in terms of agency the ability for an organism or um even a robot to act autonomously now going beyond the simple concept of an agent we can have something that is called sentient uh siience describes the ability of an organism to express feelings or even complex emotions uh from sensient we can then consider something like wakefulness the conscious experience of being awake as opposed to being asleep and finally self-awareness the actual uh conception of an organism of itself now that's to say nothing of the spiritual moral and religious implications of the word Consciousness people often talk about the goal of achieving a higher state of consciousness through meditation or prayer or even the possibility of achieving some kind of Christ Consciousness Cosmic Consciousness which brings us to questions of the ability to contemplate the mysteries of life and the question some have put forward as to whether Consciousness is in fact a ubiquitous property of the Universe um so regardless of any philosophical moral of or religious questions about cons as a physicist I'm just going to focus on the most simple rudimentary one to see if I can get a foothold there and then develop a theory of Consciousness from the most primitive Elementary building blocks which again are the actions that an individual organism can produce in response to its environment now this might be something as simple as an amiba uh pursuing engulfing and ultimately devouring its prey so if you take a look at this uh drawing of an amoeba here and the little bacteria that it is about to absorb uh number of things are going on as the amoeba seeks out and acquires its food or likewise avoids danger tries to avoid getting eaten itself uh this kind of picture of Consciousness as a response to bodily functions is sometimes known as embodied cognition and of course uh much has been said by philosophers about that as well this brings us to the question of quantum biology and Quantum Consciousness and the question of where the two meet if at all there have been many conjectures on Quantum Consciousness uh beginning with ideas from John Von noyman and Eugene wigner uh proposing that uh in fact the uh so-called wave function collapse in quantum mechanics may be caused by Consciousness in contrast uh people like steuart Hammer off and Roger Penrose have proposed things the other way around that actually uh wave function collapsed through quantum gravity somehow plays a role in generating Consciousness and all this is to say nothing of longstanding debates about the role of Consciousness and matter and the interplay between them the old saying mind over matter of course comes to mind and this kind of picture of the universe as a mind matter Duality was popularized by Carl Jung and physicist Wolf Gang Paulie in their picture of Mind matter Duality now the issue here is that these kind of topics range from philosophical theories to pure speculations and none of these ideas are based on any necessarily empirical evidence and there's a long way to go before we can actually formulate a proper science uh to answer any of these questions if these questions are answerable by science at all so where does that leave me as a physicist well I've done some research on the current uh popular models of cognition in Psychology and Neuroscience and as a physicist what appeals to me the most is a study of active inference and what is known as the free energy principle this is work that goes back to uh original proposals uh in thermodynamics from Herman Von helmholtz the famous physicist and physician the free energy principle offers a physical basis for cognition and it says that self-organizing systems like living systems work to reduce a so-called variational free energy what this means is that a generative model predicts how sensory information is caused and the causal model is characterized by probability density functions uh which of course physicists love to calculate inferences drawn from that causal model are used to guide action uh whether you are pursuing food as an organism or avoiding danger or seeking shelter these are all the kinds of actions an organism can take uh which need to be done somewhat intelligently in order to survive finally the purpose of this whole framework is that the free energy of the model is minimized with respect to the organism sensation so the organism makes predictions about what is going to happen next it's going to get the food or not it's going to avoid danger or find shelter or not and those predictions are then matched against the actual Sensations that it receives from its senses and the predictions are either correct it predicts it's going to catch the food and it does or it doesn't ultimately the goal is minimizing the gap between the predicted outcome and the actual outcome that the organism senses the organism experiences in some limited or more complex sense and the free energy principle therefore designates a hypothesis that all physical systems remember this is physics so in universally all physical systems that perceive and respond can be constructed in this fundamental way of Trying to minimize the energy associated with the gap between what is actually happening and what the organism can predict is about to happen next and an excellent article has been written on this by friston in nature reviews Neuroscience uh which I can recommend for those who want to look into this further so finally what does this have to do with microt tual we've looked at microt tual there importance in uh living cells and the possible Quantum effects that they can Harbor including the influence of super Radiance now microt tubios are found in all complex life forms where they regulate a wide variety of sensory motor cell functions as sensory motor integrators they have many unique quantum mechanical properties ranging from uh the ability to transport exons at least short distances and their ability to to exhibit super Radiance effects under the right time temperature and length scale conditions finally as I've hinted at microtubules can enable so-called hybrid Quantum effects uh the existence of excitons the existence of vibrations or Optical excitations do not happen in isolation in microtubes but rather there's a hybridization that occurs a sort of unifying of the coordinates that are used to describe the electronic States the vibrational States the PO polarization States or polaronic states and ultimately the light matter interactions known as polariton States uh so the fact that microtubules can actually uh unify these various uh physical properties in their structures uh suggests an ideal situation where the kind of unification of multiple sensory inputs into a single uh conscious experience or at least a unified model of the environment can occur finally microtubules are known to drive unstable thermodynamics through the hydrolysis of GTP that guanosine triphosphate which is hydrolized into guanosine diphosphate now what is most fascinating about this is that this uh sort of microt tual f F GTP drives a process known as dynamical instability where the microt tual network is continually in a state of approaching equilibrium but with the addition of fuel remains in this uh thermodynamically unstable State uh perpetually now this is exactly the kind of thing we would want for a sensory motor system uh where it is constantly attempting to uh shall we say reduce the free energy minimize the free energy uh but never actually getting to a fixed minimum because of course new information is constantly coming in so microtubules exhibit the kind of thermodynamic instability that we would look for in a system that is constantly approaching equilibrium but never getting there because of course the uh free energy that is being minimized is constantly being updated as new sensory information comes in this creates an ideal picture of a micral network as having all the properties that we would need to integrate sensory motor features uh in a unified kind of mechanical or physical model of the outstanding properties the environment of the cell in order to uh enact a concerted coherent response to the environmental implications of the cell's environment uh the cell's uh habitat if you will so I hope this answers some of your questions uh about Consciousness About Cellular cognition and what microt tual excitations uh could mean uh what the super radiant effects that we've identify in microtubules what kind of implications the could these could have for cellular sensing processing and decision making in living things I'd like to acknowledge my colleagues and collaborators uh who helped me and uh honestly uh really did an incredible amount of great work in the production of this um ultraviolet super Radiance from Mega networks of tryptophan in biological architectures that was published in the Journal of physical chemistry B just last month uh so thanks very much to them uh to all my colleagues at the quantum biology laboratory in Howard University and abroad in Mexico Italy and Switzerland and of course uh to my colleagues with the guy Foundation the um uh organization that sponsored this work none of it would have been possible without them uh so hats off to them and conclusion I hope this is answered some of your questions and hopefully um proposed a lot more questions to come I know we have plenty of research to do on this field and it's uh very exciting to be able to talk to you about it today have a good day

hi everyone I&#39;m Dr B and I&#39;m here to talk to you today about some of the results of my latest article ultraviolet super Radiance from Mega networks of trpt toan in biological architectures now this work has received a lot of attention lately with over 20,000 article views since the article came out last month and an ALT metric score of 175 based on follow-up reports and news articles blogs on Facebook and X formerly known as Twitter as well as Reddit and a number of videos that have been posted about the contest and some of the implications even perhaps for Consciousness so I decided based on the questions I&#39;ve received that it would be a great opportunity for me to record a video of my own to talk about the paper and some of its implications this talk is titled Quantum effects in microt tual super Radiance and the sensory motor response again I&#39;m Dr Nathan Babcock I&#39;m a theoretical physicist specializing Quantum biology and I decided to prepared this video to answer a number of questions and to clarify some things based on a number of comments and questions that I have received about the paper so far so let&#39;s begin what are microtubules first of all microtubules are structures found in cells made of the globular protein tubulin microtubules are polymers in the cytoskeleton the cytoskeleton is the skeleton of the cell made up of actin and intermediate f Els and the microtubule organizing Center found near the center of the cell near the nuclei of the cell controls the overall structure of the cytoskeleton in animal cells tryptophan is an amino acid it&#39;s a molecule found in most proteins and it is crucial for the structure of microtubules we have analyzed a number of networks of tryptophan the uh chromophor fluorescent pigment of the protein and looking at the structures we&#39;re able to see that the actual tryptophan residues uh are organized in interesting geometrical networks with significance for their fluorescence properties as well now this work is motivated by previous studies of microt tual exons these are electronic excitations uh that Studies have shown can actually form in microtubules they&#39;re believed to be generated by reactive oxygen species these are um molecules of oxygen that have reactive properties when they interact with microtubules uh they can create what is known as Ultra weak Photon emissions these are very weak light emissions from the microtubules often just only a single photon is emitted during these processes now Ross that is to say reactive oxygen species induced exons are believed to propagate through the microtubules and this kind of quantum transfer is understood to be significant in tubulin where microt tual networks May transfer these Ross induced exiton and in fact the photon energy there that could be relevant for cell signaling so these kind of implications that were published in the Journal of photo chemistry and photobiology prompted us to follow up to see if we could learn a little bit more about the scale SC of the kind of excitons these uh Optical frequency excitations of the microtubules and what they could be doing what is their significance there so we carried out a number of simulations of an effect called super Radiance super Radiance is an effect that can occur in groups of fluorescent pigments these chromophores can not just uh produce light on their own but can interact collectively to produce a kind of collective excitation and the result is that of this is that the radiant properties can then become uh enhan and that they can emit at a faster rate the image of the microtubule shown in this slide shows you the effect of the delocalization the um spreading out of a single exiton over the entire length of a microt tual areas where the exiton is most populated are shown in red and the Lesser populations are shown in blue but you have an intermediate level of population you can see in green that stretches along the entire length of the microt tual and this is the kind of coherent excitation that Quantum physicists like myself are often interested in when we look at a single tubent spiral uh containing 13 uh tubulin dimers uh this is the basic element of a microtubule that is stacked up over and over again to produce the kind of tubular structure we&#39;ve seen already on previous slides uh what can happen is if now the tryptophan networks inside these Spirals and Columns of these spirals the tube itself uh are excited we get this Collective emission enhancement now we represent this using using the capital letter gamma to depict the collective emitter rate and the lowercase gamma to depict the single emitter rate when we take the ratio of the collective emitter rate to the single emitter rate we get an impression of the enhancement and if you look at the single spiral enhancement when we collect the tryptophan together all from the tubulin arranged in a single spiral we see perhaps an order of magnitude enhancement but if we now line up up 99 of these spirals to create a lengthy tube we can see a real significant super Radiance effect approaching 600 so this is more than two orders of magnitude uh increase in the emitter rate based on the collective enhancement versus the rate of a single emitter alone we continued this study to look at larger and larger structures that are built out of microt tual in the cell uh these are kind of structures are sometimes known as the ultra structure of the cell and looking at a Centrio this is part of the microt tual organizing center of the cell we found that collections of microtubules organized in the U radial pattern that you can see on this slide uh we can actually in principle at least achieve enhancements of three or 4,000 of The Collector Collective emitter rate over the single emitter rate what became interesting in our work was we began to look at the impact of disorder on the system of course uh physicists like to look at idealized systems but real life is never quite as ideal as we might like and so we began to introduce disorder into our simulations of the trip toan Network and what we found was uh very promising because as we increased the size of the microt tual arrangement the size of the tryptophan Network what we found was that it became more resistant to disorder that the super radiant effect actually became more robust against disorder as the size of the network increased now we can&#39;t necessarily expect that just increasing the size of the network is going to somehow make it more resistant to disorderly effects but that is what we found in this study uh where we had a significant Improvement in the resistance to the disorder term W shown on the horizontal axis of this slide as we increased the size of the cental the microt tual arrangement shown here um increasing its length from 64 nanometers all the way up to 256 nanometers now what&#39;s most important is that for a disorder parameter of 200 inverse centimeters shown in the inverse of the slide we still see a significant potential super radiant enhancement this disorder parameter is comparable to the amount of disorder you might see at thermal temperatures a realistic kind of room temperature or physiological temperatures and the largest cental we studied still showed at least an order of magnitude Improvement in the super radiant effect demonstrating that at the right time scales these kind of effects still can be found in potentially living cells we followed up on these kind of studies numerical studies with actual experimental work where we looked at the fluorescence and the absorption spectra of the tryptophan networks uh shall we say an individual tryptophan molecules shown in the orange curves of this slide as well as in individual tubulin diers and whole microtubules um which are shown in green and blue respectively now what is something interesting to see here is the Stoke shift that&#39;s the gap appap between the fluoresence peak and the absorption Peak changes as we go from Individual tryptophan molecules to tubuland dimers and whole microtubules indicating that the actual geometric structure of these systems does have a significant effect on the spectral properties of the uh fluorescence in these systems again reinforcing the idea that the actual Quantum effects that we numerically are having a legitimate impact in our actual laboratory experiments uh further experiments that we talk about in the Journal of physical chemistry B article that I showed at the beginning of this talk uh showed enhancements in the quantum yield uh that would be hard to explain in microtubules without some kind of fluoresence enhancement effect leading us to conclude that indeed even at normal laboratory room temperatures uh that the actual super radiant effect that we predict from our numerics is providing an enhancement in microtubules in normal ambient conditions why is this significant well light and these reactive oxygen species these reactive forms of the oxygen molecule have an impact on microtubular structure and their Dynamics something import important is that the Stoke shift uh about 100 pardon me 1,200 nanometers or one electron volt to a physicist is comparable to the energy that&#39;s already stored in microtubules from their fuel source uh GTP to GDP conversion which is about a fifth of an electron volt um we know that tubulin absorbs and REITs ultraviolet energy capturing energy in the near infrared around this frequency range and that the Stoke shift is significantly reduced in tubulin so it shows us that the right kind of energies uh both uh in the ground to singlet transition of the reactive oxygen species in the transition from GTP to GDP the fuel source of the microtubules and um the actual uh vibrations themselves in the infrared spectrum of the mic microt tual are all at the same uh wavelength no pun intended they their frequ their frequencies are comparable showing that these systems uh these aspects of the systems all can interact now why this is important is that when we look at uh flower petal cells as you show can see here in the electron microscopy images shown that if you look at the control petal cells uh these are aerod opsis flower petal cells uh that have been and uh not treated at all they have kind of a conical shape as opposed to flower petal cells that are treated with reactive oxygen species uh they become more bubish shown uh to the lower right of the two figures here and now this is important because uh we know that microtubules can also be randomized or fragmented uh even depolarized under UV light and that similar effects happen when they&#39;re exposed to reactive oxygen species U what&#39;s more is that microt growth Inhibitors uh that have been uh studied to in experiments exploring the actual properties of microt tual growth are also tryptophan fluorescence quenchers uh they dampen out the tryptophan fluorescence and that though both UV light and reactive oxygen species can produce the same kind of swelling in these plant cells due to their interaction with the microt tual network itself microtubules also mod monitor reactive oxygen species they&#39;re sensors of the cells indicating a highly intertwined uh effects between tryptophan fluorescence uh absorption and reactive oxygen species mediated excitations in these cells which again control both the uh structure Dynamics and ultimately the growth of the microt tuum netw works in these cells This is highly important because microtubules aren&#39;t just structure uh structural components they&#39;re active sensor systems in the cell uh there&#39;s a lot of research that has been shown to indicate that microtubules sense structural tension uh sense stress uh redo chemistry and as I mentioned now light in the cell now they&#39;re not just passive sensors they&#39;re Active Components and the hydris of GTP that is guanosine triphosphate uh dri phonon vibrations these are just mechanical vibrations in the microt tual now it was proposed in 2010 that microtubules could undergo a kind of mode locking effect locking in some modes of these vibrations while locking out others and this kind of mode locking or phase locking effect is a significant one that&#39;s often used in Quantum Optics Laboratories to create Ultra fast laser pulses so this is a significant kind of effect to look for and in fact future studies um well this is 2021 now uh showed that microtubules that exhibit coherent motions and that they can act as Optical cavities and further studies from 2022 have shown that actually there is electron phonon coupling that is coupling between the electronic the excited exiton States and the phonon vibrational states to create what&#39;s known as a phop poon so there&#39;s a lot of evidence to show that there are the kind of typical Quantum optic effects that you would look for in a Quantum Optics lab in the microt tual systems themselves so this brings us to the idea of microtubules not just as structural elements and sensors but as real actuators uh sensory motor integrators or Governors as they used to say in the old days and they are vital to cell structure cell division cell motility and sensing uh as I mentioned before microtubules sense stress in Plants uh they can sense and respond to Cellular tension and they can actually enact proprioceptive control that is the cell&#39;s sense of its environment and this kind of cellular perception then proceeds to control cell morphology similar to the morphological changes in the flower petal cells that I showed on a pre previous slide now given the fact that microtubules are also good light Harvest ERS this really ties together a picture of microtubules as sensory motor integrators of mechanical Optical and chemical information inside and around the cell this is significant in light of the discovery of super Radiance because of the numerous U properties of super Radiance that have been proposed to be valuable to Quantum Computing that is to say Quantum information processing ing applications so there&#39;s a number of unrelated works on super Radiance that have shown that super Radiance can be used to control uh and produce individual photons for non-classical light sources uh to generate correlative photons and to produce even so-called super radiant lasers a new type of laser that is different from the underlying physics of the lasers we have in our laser pointers or in our CD players now even more importantly that uh super Radiance can now be used to control dissipative Dynamics and this is of crucial importance for Quantum information processing applications where the decoherence of the system needs to be controlled in order to prevent the system from losing the phase coherence which is so crucial to its operation as a Quantum information processing device um now the use of the control of dissipative Dynamics um can also be used to create so-called dark States in fact in whenever you create a super radiant State a short-lived fast emitting State you also create a so-called subradiant state or dark state which is a slow emitting state which now can be used for a kind of quantum memory in effect now none of these kind of uh more Quantum information processing effects have been showed conclusively yet in microt tubies but what is important to understand is that the super Radiance is a Hallmark of all of these effects and so when we go look at cells for super Radiance and cells where we already know they have very important uh sensory motor processing functions it&#39;s very interesting now to consider that the natural consequences of super radiant could be involved in cellular processing as well does this mean that there is quantum Computing in the brain for those who are familiar with Neurology or Neuroscience you may be aware that microtubules are a very important part of neurons the highest proportion of microt tubies in the body are found in the brain so some have speculated that the brain could if it has these Quantum effects in microtubules be a quantum computer people have asked me Dr B what do you think of this and I would say not exactly I mean I agree all eukaryotic cells contain microtubules and microtubules are most abundant in nerves and certainly microtubular networks are vastly complex as you see in the image of this cell uh we can see the nucleus in blue and the microt tual network in green and you can clearly see the kind of uh Center microt tual organizing Center uh that organizes the microt tual network from near the nucleus in the cell so clearly there&#39;s very important processing going on structural chemical sensory motor processing going on in the cell um almost certainly some kind of underlying Quantum effects driving these kind of properties uh but that doesn&#39;t necessarily allow us to just jump to the conclusion that the cell is somehow a quantum computer uh the way computer scientists think of it at least so what does this mean for Quantum Consciousness research there&#39;s been much said about Quantum Consciousness research in light of microt tual discoveries the issue with speculating on the role of these biophysical effects for Consciousness research is that Consciousness research right now is philosophy not physics if you look up the definition of Consciousness in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy uh we can see that perhaps no aspect of the mind is more familiar or more puzzling than Consciousness and the conscious experience now this is problematic for doing science because currently there is no agreed upon theory of what Consciousness actually is or even necessarily how to study it so given that Consciousness research is currently at the level of philosophical inquiry it presents challenges for actually doing hard science related to investigations of Consciousness now that doesn&#39;t rule out scientific Consciousness research but it presents problems for the clarity of that research when we think of Consciousness there&#39;s a number of different definitions that come to mind there&#39;s a so-called kind of ladder of Consciousness going from the most primitive forms of Consciousness which is simply uh in presented in terms of agency the ability for an organism or um even a robot to act autonomously now going beyond the simple concept of an agent we can have something that is called sentient uh siience describes the ability of an organism to express feelings or even complex emotions uh from sensient we can then consider something like wakefulness the conscious experience of being awake as opposed to being asleep and finally self-awareness the actual uh conception of an organism of itself now that&#39;s to say nothing of the spiritual moral and religious implications of the word Consciousness people often talk about the goal of achieving a higher state of consciousness through meditation or prayer or even the possibility of achieving some kind of Christ Consciousness Cosmic Consciousness which brings us to questions of the ability to contemplate the mysteries of life and the question some have put forward as to whether Consciousness is in fact a ubiquitous property of the Universe um so regardless of any philosophical moral of or religious questions about cons as a physicist I&#39;m just going to focus on the most simple rudimentary one to see if I can get a foothold there and then develop a theory of Consciousness from the most primitive Elementary building blocks which again are the actions that an individual organism can produce in response to its environment now this might be something as simple as an amiba uh pursuing engulfing and ultimately devouring its prey so if you take a look at this uh drawing of an amoeba here and the little bacteria that it is about to absorb uh number of things are going on as the amoeba seeks out and acquires its food or likewise avoids danger tries to avoid getting eaten itself uh this kind of picture of Consciousness as a response to bodily functions is sometimes known as embodied cognition and of course uh much has been said by philosophers about that as well this brings us to the question of quantum biology and Quantum Consciousness and the question of where the two meet if at all there have been many conjectures on Quantum Consciousness uh beginning with ideas from John Von noyman and Eugene wigner uh proposing that uh in fact the uh so-called wave function collapse in quantum mechanics may be caused by Consciousness in contrast uh people like steuart Hammer off and Roger Penrose have proposed things the other way around that actually uh wave function collapsed through quantum gravity somehow plays a role in generating Consciousness and all this is to say nothing of longstanding debates about the role of Consciousness and matter and the interplay between them the old saying mind over matter of course comes to mind and this kind of picture of the universe as a mind matter Duality was popularized by Carl Jung and physicist Wolf Gang Paulie in their picture of Mind matter Duality now the issue here is that these kind of topics range from philosophical theories to pure speculations and none of these ideas are based on any necessarily empirical evidence and there&#39;s a long way to go before we can actually formulate a proper science uh to answer any of these questions if these questions are answerable by science at all so where does that leave me as a physicist well I&#39;ve done some research on the current uh popular models of cognition in Psychology and Neuroscience and as a physicist what appeals to me the most is a study of active inference and what is known as the free energy principle this is work that goes back to uh original proposals uh in thermodynamics from Herman Von helmholtz the famous physicist and physician the free energy principle offers a physical basis for cognition and it says that self-organizing systems like living systems work to reduce a so-called variational free energy what this means is that a generative model predicts how sensory information is caused and the causal model is characterized by probability density functions uh which of course physicists love to calculate inferences drawn from that causal model are used to guide action uh whether you are pursuing food as an organism or avoiding danger or seeking shelter these are all the kinds of actions an organism can take uh which need to be done somewhat intelligently in order to survive finally the purpose of this whole framework is that the free energy of the model is minimized with respect to the organism sensation so the organism makes predictions about what is going to happen next it&#39;s going to get the food or not it&#39;s going to avoid danger or find shelter or not and those predictions are then matched against the actual Sensations that it receives from its senses and the predictions are either correct it predicts it&#39;s going to catch the food and it does or it doesn&#39;t ultimately the goal is minimizing the gap between the predicted outcome and the actual outcome that the organism senses the organism experiences in some limited or more complex sense and the free energy principle therefore designates a hypothesis that all physical systems remember this is physics so in universally all physical systems that perceive and respond can be constructed in this fundamental way of Trying to minimize the energy associated with the gap between what is actually happening and what the organism can predict is about to happen next and an excellent article has been written on this by friston in nature reviews Neuroscience uh which I can recommend for those who want to look into this further so finally what does this have to do with microt tual we&#39;ve looked at microt tual there importance in uh living cells and the possible Quantum effects that they can Harbor including the influence of super Radiance now microt tubios are found in all complex life forms where they regulate a wide variety of sensory motor cell functions as sensory motor integrators they have many unique quantum mechanical properties ranging from uh the ability to transport exons at least short distances and their ability to to exhibit super Radiance effects under the right time temperature and length scale conditions finally as I&#39;ve hinted at microtubules can enable so-called hybrid Quantum effects uh the existence of excitons the existence of vibrations or Optical excitations do not happen in isolation in microtubes but rather there&#39;s a hybridization that occurs a sort of unifying of the coordinates that are used to describe the electronic States the vibrational States the PO polarization States or polaronic states and ultimately the light matter interactions known as polariton States uh so the fact that microtubules can actually uh unify these various uh physical properties in their structures uh suggests an ideal situation where the kind of unification of multiple sensory inputs into a single uh conscious experience or at least a unified model of the environment can occur finally microtubules are known to drive unstable thermodynamics through the hydrolysis of GTP that guanosine triphosphate which is hydrolized into guanosine diphosphate now what is most fascinating about this is that this uh sort of microt tual f F GTP drives a process known as dynamical instability where the microt tual network is continually in a state of approaching equilibrium but with the addition of fuel remains in this uh thermodynamically unstable State uh perpetually now this is exactly the kind of thing we would want for a sensory motor system uh where it is constantly attempting to uh shall we say reduce the free energy minimize the free energy uh but never actually getting to a fixed minimum because of course new information is constantly coming in so microtubules exhibit the kind of thermodynamic instability that we would look for in a system that is constantly approaching equilibrium but never getting there because of course the uh free energy that is being minimized is constantly being updated as new sensory information comes in this creates an ideal picture of a micral network as having all the properties that we would need to integrate sensory motor features uh in a unified kind of mechanical or physical model of the outstanding properties the environment of the cell in order to uh enact a concerted coherent response to the environmental implications of the cell&#39;s environment uh the cell&#39;s uh habitat if you will so I hope this answers some of your questions uh about Consciousness About Cellular cognition and what microt tual excitations uh could mean uh what the super radiant effects that we&#39;ve identify in microtubules what kind of implications the could these could have for cellular sensing processing and decision making in living things I&#39;d like to acknowledge my colleagues and collaborators uh who helped me and uh honestly uh really did an incredible amount of great work in the production of this um ultraviolet super Radiance from Mega networks of tryptophan in biological architectures that was published in the Journal of physical chemistry B just last month uh so thanks very much to them uh to all my colleagues at the quantum biology laboratory in Howard University and abroad in Mexico Italy and Switzerland and of course uh to my colleagues with the guy Foundation the um uh organization that sponsored this work none of it would have been possible without them uh so hats off to them and conclusion I hope this is answered some of your questions and hopefully um proposed a lot more questions to come I know we have plenty of research to do on this field and it&#39;s uh very exciting to be able to talk to you about it today have a good day

Transcript for:Ultraviolet Super Radiance in Biological Architectures

Transcript for:
Ultraviolet Super Radiance in Biological Architectures