Shortly after Max Planck shook the scientific world with ideas about the fundamental quantization of energy, researchers built and leveraged theories of quantum mechanics to resolve physical phenomena that had previously been unexplainable, including the behavior of heat in solids and light absorption on an atomic level. In the 120-plus years since, researchers have looked beyond physics and used quantum theory’s same perplexing — even “spooky,” according to Einstein — laws to solve inexplicable phenomena in a variety of other disciplines.
Today, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are applying quantum mechanics to biology to better understand of one of nature’s biggest mysteries — magnetosensitivity, an organism’s ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a tool to adjust some biological processes. And they’ve found some surprising results.
In a recent study, APL research engineer and scientist Carlos Martino and his APL colleagues Nam Le, Michael Salerno, Janna Domenico, Christopher Stiles, Megan Hannegan, and Ryan McQuillen, along with Ilia Solov’yov from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany, found that an enzyme that plays a central role in human metabolism has some of the same key features as a magnetically sensitive protein found in birds.
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