Thread by @DrJackKruse

1. Biochemical reactions can no longer explain most of the things in biology. Everyone better make room for quantum mechanisms in their own lives. Today's PSA is on olfaction.

2. What if I told you that melanocytes help us smell would you believe me? Probably not, but soon I am going to tell you in a podcast that we hear using light with melanin and K+. Where did the idea come from? I read this paper in medical school. pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.107…

3. Then in 1996 I read the work of Luca Turin and the work of Richard Axel. At the same time, we discovered a huge crater in the gulf of Mexico during surveys and a physicist thought this was tied to dinosaur extinction and mammalian dominance.

4. The KT event disrupted light and this lowered oxygen tensions on Earth. This would have put amazing stress on the HIF1 alpha system and the PER 2 gene class of mammals and birds. When light changes everything that relies on it changes.

5. Now layer this with a global sign where many people lost taste and smell due to a spike protein in the ACE 2 receptor system. A protein is known to change vibrational states in testing. This topic made me go back and think about all I learned in neurosurgery about olfaction

6. Quantum biology is almost as old as quantum mechanics itself. Where quantum mechanics is often preoccupied with the interaction of light and matter, photosynthesis, the backbone of biology, is the interaction of light with living matter.

7. Bohr himself delivered a lecture titled ‘Light and Life’. Schrödinger, for his part, wrote What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, served as inspiration for the discovery of DNA.

8.

9. The history of quantum biology laid out

10. In a discussion of life, viruses offer a novel case study, straddling, as they do, the properties of both living and non-living systems. As such, they might also offer a novel application for quantum biology.

11. There has been some research investigating how quantum mechanics and viruses intersect. For example, Park et al. engineered a virus to obtain enhanced energy transport in excitonic networks.

12. Quantum dots have been used to label viral proteins in an attempt to enhance live imaging of virus-host interactions. They have also been suggested to have antiviral properties. There has even been an attempt to simulate the life cycle of a virus using quantum gates.

13. The vibrational theory of smell (olfaction) was first proposed by Malcolm Dyson in 1928. Many thought the Nobel Prize given in 2004 put a wrap on how humans smell. Not by a long shot.

14. Charge transfer, by light, changes vibrational modes in molecules we sense. Moreover, this is also important in the context of tunneling in enzymes, which was first observed a number of decades ago.

15. Chromophores in cells are a central theme with respect to quantum effects in photosynthesis and mitochondrial respiration. Many have suggested that quantum coherence might play a role in energy and charge transfer.

16. This is perhaps less a unique feature of photosynthesis than it is due to the more general arrangement of chromophores in proteins. This viewpoint has shocked most conventional biologists. All these are chromophores below

17. With this mindset, one must realize that all chromophores, then, would appear to be important to redox activity in biological materials. There is also a growing focus on the role that the protein scaffold (AMO Physical arrangement) plays in enhancing energy or charge transfer

18. Far from the warm, wet, decoherent environment that is often cited as an argument against quantum effects in biology, the vibrational or spin states of proteins might be coupled to electronic states in a favorable way.

19. Water changes its physical state when light interacts with it and this keeps the local area in a different physical state to help explain change transfer. This makes sense in the ear where the relationship of melanin to potassium chloride exists.

20. KCL is a high band gap dopant that emits light with a wide band gap of 7.67 eV. Melanin can absorb every frequency of that light and the endolymph duct's water can get the rest. This mimics what water does in a nuclear reactor to control the quantum process in a reactor.

21. The Interaction of light with proteins can fundamentally change the properties of a chromophore. Melanopsin, neuropsin, rhodopsin and all related opsins, for instance, absorb across a range of frequencies even though they share the same chromophore: retinal. Look below again!

22. What differs in this AMO arrangement is the opsin protein, which "tunes" the chromophore’s absorption frequency.
In 2006, Researchers have demonstrated the existence of an olfactory receptor in pigment-producing cells in human skin, the so-called melanocytes.

23. They have shown that the violet-like scent Beta-Ionone can activate the skin receptor. I used this in the lavender mito-hack that I wrote about on LinkedIn years ago.
linkedin.com/pulse/lavender…

24. Olfactory receptors are a class of ancient rhodopsin-like receptors known as G-protein coupled receptors or GPCRs. Light reception uses the same receptors in humans. So do hormones which are like ferry boats for light in our cells.

25. These receptors are implicated in numerous important physiological phenomena from the regulation of inflammation to the binding of neurotransmitters in the brain. This is currently emerging as a new application of vibration-assisted electron tunneling in neuroscience.

26. Electron tunneling in these contexts has been investigated as an alternative to the lock-and-key mechanism, a shape-based explanation of receptor binding.

27. Sometimes bad science gets rewarded in centralized systems of belief.
Richard Axel and Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize in physiology for mapping the genes and receptors of our sense of smell.

28. The 2 discovered 100s of genes code for the odorant sensors located in CN #1 of our noses. This confirms the lock and key ideas from 1928. Each receptor is a protein that changes when an odor attaches to the receptor, causing an electrical signal to be sent to the brain.

29. That is the belief today in centralized Ivory towers of academia. Differences between odorant sensors mean that certain odors cause a signal to be released from a certain receptor. We are then able to interpret varying signals from our receptors as specific scents.

30. Was the “shape theory” not validated as a foregone conclusion or just the most palatable of theories?

31. What you might not know is many of Axel's friends in science went out to prove Turin's ideas wrong. So far to date not one of them has proven Turin wrong. In fact, many results in biophysics are making him look right and making Axel and Buck look like frauds.

32. Human smell perception is not ONLY influenced by the shape of the odor molecule but by oscillations in which electrons will quantum tunnel across energy gaps in the olfactory receptors.

33. This decentralized idea has a lot of brilliant ideas in it because we know DNA, photosynthesis, bone, and enzymes all use the same effects. These effects are also found in the mitochondrial of olfactory nerves in the human brain.

34. The exact mechanism by which we recognize different scent molecules is one of the great mysteries of our physiology. Many people in centralized science think this science is settled since Richard Axel was given and Noble Prize in 2004 for the lock and key model of olfaction.

35. Many Nobel Prizes have been given for a half-truth. While a complete explanation of our sense of smell may fall under the purview of biology, the fundamental physical phenomena that we are in fact detecting in labs today....

36. after this Prize was given years ago might be only explainable by quantum mechanics. I used to believe in Axel's work. I no longer do. I believe human smell perception is governed by quantum spin-residual information.

37. Recently researchers (2020) used infrared light to excite the molecular bond oscillation in odor molecules. As the molecules absorb the light, they begin to oscillate and emit an infrared photon, which contains spin-residual information.

38. To test the differences in olfactory perception of molecules at different levels of excitation, 23 human subjects were given two different scents to smell, one citrusy and the other musky.

39. Each smell was illuminated under three different conditions: two different infrared wavelengths and a non-infrared light outside of the visible spectrum for control.

40. The subjects were asked to smell each scenario 10 times and rate the intensity of their smell perception for each inhale with an integer value. The first five whiffs of each test had no illumination, and the second five had one of the three illumination conditions.

41. Each subject’s fifth inhale intensity was normalized to an intensity value of 10, and the non-infrared data was subtracted from the excited data to correct for psychological effects.

42. The researchers found in all scenarios that the intensity of the smell was affected by external infrared illumination. To them, this means molecular bonding vibrations and spin residuals play a role in smell perception.
BOOM

43. The pandemic only reinforced that belief. The spike protein changes the vibration of the scent receptors in the olfactory nerve to cause the loss of taste and smell. Who do you believe now?
academic.oup.com/chemse/article…

44. That ends today's lesson on quantum biology. If you like it come follow my work on Patreon at patreon.com/DrJackKruse