Quantum Biology 2.0: Traversing and harnessing protein superhighway networks of light and life

Abstract

As an emergent field stimulated by insights from the biological, chemical, physical, and quantum sciences, quantum biology explores how quantum phenomena such as superradiance, tunneling, and entanglement can be leveraged to enhance, influence, and probe biological processes across a diversity of scales and physical degrees of freedom. This review surveys key theoretical, computational, and experimental developments over the last decade, providing relevant historical background and scientific context going back as far as Bohr's 1932 lecture on “Light and Life” in Copenhagen. Reflecting major new areas of investigation, biophysical intuitions, and advancements in critical areas of study from earlier decades, we highlight superradiance and quantum cooperativity; exciton–phonon interactions and long‐range electrodynamic organization; quantum tunneling, entanglement, and dispersion effects in protein processes; ultraweak metabolic photon emissions; photosynthesis; magnetosensing and chirality‐induced spin dynamics; and emerging quantum technologies employed to delicately observe biosystems or to harness life's complexity and hierarchical order. In each section of the review, we provide foundational information or primers to augment understanding of the underlying physical processes. We highlight various theoretical and experimental milestones while looking forward to new discoveries on these “supremely interesting [and] unsurveyably intricate” protein architectures, which Schrödinger envisioned in What is Life? would serve a far‐reaching and consummate purpose of communication and information processing.