EAGER: Quantum-coherent transport in bacterial protein nanowires

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The project seeks to evaluate the role of quantum coherence in bacterial growth, respiration and communication. The PIs of this project have discovered that common soil bacteria have evolved metalloprotein nanowires to get rid of electrons derived from metabolism. The nanowires allow bacteria to survive in harsh environments that lack membrane-permeable electron acceptors such as oxygen. This discovery suggests a unique quantum material, exhibiting metal-like properties, with theoretically-predicted electronic coherence, and quantum-coherent electron transfer, that can be further accelerated with light. Surprisingly, the coherence is preserved under extreme aqueous and acidic environments. Understanding what makes this coherence robust to survive in the face of disorder and noise will help in designing bacterial communities that can: preserve coherence to accelerate charge transport, autonomously optimize their performance in changing environments as well as sense and signal damage to initiate self-repair. The PIs will integrate this research into a range of educational and outreach activities for students at all levels by using this multidisciplinary research as a vehicle to enhance recruitment, retention, education, and training of students, with attention to those from underrepresented groups by leveraging our existing infrastructure to enhance diversity and inclusion.The PIs will develop new systems of synthesis, characterization, and modeling for quantum properties of protein nanowires. By characterizing transport of electrons, ions, excitons, and chirality-induced, highly-polarized spins in nanowires, at surprising ultrafast rates and centimeter distances, the PIs will quantify the spin relaxation, diffusion length as well as coherence length and time to elucidate design principles and mechanisms.This project is supported by the Molecular Biophysics Cluster of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in Biological Sciences Directorate.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.