Enzymes capture light's energy from the sun, power our cells, break down our food and synthesise all the proteins, DNA, fats and other biomolecules of living cells. They do all these jobs by speeding up chemical reactions, so that they occur on biological, rather than geological timescales. But the source of this ability to speed up reactions has eluded modern scientists. Billion-fold rate enhancements are routine: many enzymes can accelerate a chemical reaction a trillion-fold. Some of the tricks enzymes employ are pretty well understood, but not the process as a whole.
Yes, it was the headline that caught me (there aren't enough pre-World Cup games to keep me busy at the moment...). But, read the article, it's fascinating. Okay, very little World Cup info, but it'll keep me going till Friday.
Enzymes live in the strange realm of fundamental particles, where conventional rules break down and quantum mechanics takes over. Remember Schrödinger's cat, that could exist as a weird superposition of a live and dead feline if it lived in the quantum world? Quantum mechanical particles don't have regular positions in space or time, but exist as a kind of fog of all possible positions and states. Sometimes this fog allows particles to go places or do things that would normally be prohibited, in a process called "quantum tunnelling", which is used in modern electronic devices such as tunnel diodes and is likely to be the basis of 21st-century technologies such as quantum computing.
God, I exist in a fog most of the time, and I seldom feel fundamental (and I certainly don't go places). Go figure...
...claims that an enzyme called aromatic amine dehydrogenase (AADH) accelerates its chemical reaction by bringing the substrate particles so close to the enzyme that the fog of particle positions overlaps, allowing a proton to "quantum tunnel" from substrate to enzyme.
So far so good. We're into the biology now...but where's Rooney's foot? And how the hell are they going to get it fixed before England goes out. Manchester United can afford a new quantum computer to fix his foot (in any fog of handwaving and abracadabra). Surely?
If Da Vinci were alive today, he'd have tossed away any book selling dubious mysteries - instead, he'd be reading about quantum tunnelling and praying for Rooney's foot.
Yes, but since Da Vinci was Italian (he was, wasn't he?), I wonder what he'd have been praying...
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