EAGER: Quantum-coherent transport in bacterial protein nanowires

该项目旨在评估量子相干性在细菌生长、呼吸和通讯中的作用。该项目的pi发现，普通土壤细菌已经进化出金属蛋白纳米线，以摆脱代谢产生的电子。这种纳米线可以让细菌在缺乏氧气等可透过膜的电子受体的恶劣环境中生存。这一发现表明了一种独特的量子材料，表现出类似金属的性质，具有理论预测的电子相干性和量子相干电子转移，可以被光进一步加速。令人惊讶的是，这种一致性在极端的水环境和酸性环境下都能保持下来。了解是什么使这种相干性在面对无序和噪声时保持强大的生存能力，将有助于设计细菌群落，这些细菌群落可以：保持相干性以加速电荷传输，在变化的环境中自主优化其性能，以及感知和信号损伤以启动自我修复。pi将利用这一多学科研究作为加强学生招聘、留用、教育和培训的工具，将这项研究整合到一系列面向各级学生的教育和推广活动中，并通过利用我们现有的基础设施来增强多样性和包容性，关注那些代表性不足的群体。pi将开发蛋白质纳米线量子特性合成、表征和建模的新系统。通过表征纳米线中电子、离子、激子和手性诱导的高极化自旋的输运，以惊人的超快速率和厘米距离，pi将量化自旋弛豫、扩散长度以及相干长度和时间，以阐明设计原则和机制。该项目由生物科学理事会分子和细胞生物科学部分子生物物理集群支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.