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Sense of Smell Tied To Quantum Physics?
SpaceAdmiral writes "A controversial theory that proposes that our sense of smell is based not on the shape of the molecules that enter our nose but on their vibrations was given a boost recently when University College London researchers determined that the quantum physics involved makes sense. The theory, proposed in the mid-1990s by biophysicist Luca Turin, suggests that electron tunneling initiates the smell signal being sent to the brain. It could explain why similarly shaped molecules can have very different smells, and molecules with very different structures can smell similar." Turin has now formed a company to design odorants using his theory, and claims an advantage over the competition of two orders of magnitude in rate of discovery. The article concludes, "At the very least, he is putting his money where his nose is."
On the other hand, if it turns out to be true, it has far-reaching implications. A lot of people have been saying for a long time that quantum effects simply cannot be a factor in the brain, or causing neurons to fire or not, because their effect is too weak. This would be a counterexample and might cause us to look more seriously at quantum activity in the brain. One theory of the mechanism of memory is that it is stored as a series of quantum oscillations creating a sort of holographic pattern...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will
probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to
be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely
enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the
twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the
reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is
a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the
secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange
array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the
ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is
found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can
discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the
cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into
the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some
convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts --
physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that
nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting
ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it
and forget it all!
- Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, v. 1, p. 3-10
(This lecture is also one of the six lectures featured in a book &
audio edition entitled "Six Easy Pieces")
Dammit! Mad props to you as I was thinking alanine. That of course is exactly why Slashdot gets you in trouble. You type stuff in off the top of your head to get your entry in and sometimes you get it wrong. The cool thing is that there are folks on Slashdot that will catch you.
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I wouldn't even call it that unconventional. There are lots of examples of ligand-protein interactions where you can't get the experimental affinity right, unless you make the energy-minimization time-dependent and compute the mean. This is not only a matter of the fact that the protein will adapt slightly when binding the ligand, but really that we have a continuous movement going on. A conformation where one vibration would suddenly be totally fixed, although it looks fine if you look at the static average, might be quite disastrous. This will be important if we ever want to be really good at engineering new enzyme specificities, or new ligands. Creating perfumes is of course a rather useless special case of the latter, and while it might be news to the odor industry, it shouldn't raise any eyebrows in the pharmeceutical industry. (At least if TFA is anywhere close to describing the actual theory...)