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Cake day: March 13th, 2024

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  • Lots of stretching here. The paper uses simulations of microtubules to show quantum effects when tryptophan residues are excited by UV light. The paper only did simulations of microtubules, and those simulations did not include the bends and many many dynein molecules found on microtubules. The reason this is important is that researchers have been hitting every biomolecule with UV excitation for decades, including microtubules, and have never observed this effect.

    A key finding missing from this video is that microtubules are dynamic. They are constantly disassembling and reassembling and recycling components. This occurs at very short timescales. Also, they do not bridge cell membranes. If information is passing through networks of microtubules, it is constantly disrupted and not affecting other cells. Synapses do handle cell-cell information transfer (where the role of microtubules is already well studied and not quantum in nature). Why would quantum microtubule information be limited to a single cell? Maybe it could influence coordinated assembly and disassembly at the termini, but the authors offer no evidence that there is any chemical effect of this quantum phenomenon, which would be required to change anything about how those enzymes behave.

    We already know of a mechanism by which information is transported across microtubules: physical transport of signalling molecules. They are walked (quite literally, dynein is cool) along the microtubules to different sites in the cell. No quantum effects needed to explain this phenomenon.