English

Tubulin dipole moment, dielectric constant and quantum behavior: computer simulations, experimental results and suggestions

Biological Physics 2007-05-23 v1 Medical Physics

Abstract

We used computer simulation to calculate the electric dipole moments of the alpha and beta tubulin monomers and dimer and found those to be |palpha|=552D, |pbeta|=1193D and |palpha-beta|=1740D respectively. Independent surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and refractometry measurements of the high-frequency dielectric constant and polarizability strongly corroborated our previous SPR-derived results giving delta-n/delta-c ~1.800x10^-3 ml/mg. The refractive index of tubulin was measured to be n_tub ~2.90 and the high frequency tubulin dielectric constant kappa_tub ~8.41 while the high-frequency polarizability was found to be alpha_tub ~ 2.1x10^-33 C m^2/V. Methods for the experimental determination of the low-frequency p are explored as well as ways to test the often conjectured quantum coherence and entanglement properties of tubulin. Biobits, bioqubits and other applications to bioelectronics are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0402053,
  title  = {Tubulin dipole moment, dielectric constant and quantum behavior: computer simulations, experimental results and suggestions},
  author = {Andreas Mershin and Alexandre A. Kolomenski and Hans A. Schuessler and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0402053},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

A.M. is corresponding author: [email protected] 32 double-spaced pages, 4 figures. Keywords: tubulin, electric dipole moment, biobit, bioqubit, quantum, entanglement, surface plasmon resonance, refractometry, refractive index, quantum brain