[HN Gopher] Quantum tunneling makes DNA more unstable
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Quantum tunneling makes DNA more unstable
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-09-21 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| dkural wrote:
| We have massive datasets on mutations, and looking at the
| mutational signatures, there is no evidence that this plays any
| detectable role in practice, here's some different articles
| studying such things:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12477
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210309109
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7408
|
| The known mutational processes entirely dominate the picture as
| one can see.
| dekhn wrote:
| The latter two are better links than the first- since the first
| appears to be sampling from cancer genomes, which probably
| don't have precisely the same mutational spectrum as typical
| genomes, especially after the repair machinery stops working.
| metadat wrote:
| Unstable like how much? "prone to cancer", or unstable like
| "physical destruction due to DNA helixes ripped apart"?
| NoraCodes wrote:
| The article suggests that it is a minor cause of point
| mutations.
| metadat wrote:
| Yes, I've been scouring TFA but what I wish to learn is:
|
| What is the practical outcome of experiencing / accumulating
| said mutations?
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| In the vast majority of cases, nothing, as the mutations
| will likely be silent. In the worst case, a point mutation
| could possible lead to the development of a cancer. But
| remember, the article says this has been going on all the
| time as natural process. It's not new. So no increased risk
| from this process.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| The former, though likely still at a pretty low rate. These
| instabilities can result in mis-pairing at replication which
| results in a mutation in the replicated strand. Article
| suggests that this may be a significant source of mutations
| that was previously not considered.
|
| Article says: We find it to be several orders of magnitude
| greater than the observed rate (10-8 per base pair) of
| spontaneous mutations through, for example, copying errors,
| suggesting that tautomerisation may well play an important role
| in point mutations.
| noduerme wrote:
| So if the final state of something as large as an amino acid pair
| at time of copying is determined by a single wave collapse...
| wouldn't that really mean that cancer generation is entirely
| avoided in some nontrivial subset of universes? (Hint: the subset
| you're reading this in, if you haven't had cancer?)
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Brb, founding a quantum crystal healing startup.
| layer8 wrote:
| Read up on quantum immortality.
| blamestross wrote:
| If the universe you live in is getting increasingly surreal,
| be concerned. Universes where you survive a maximal time are
| likely to be wierd and not fun for you.
| layer8 wrote:
| No, that's not how it works. At every moment, the
| likelihood of future moments to be normal is overwhelming
| (even if you're already 200 years old). But among all
| physically possible futures, there's presumably always at
| least one where you continue living. And that future may be
| otherwise perfectly normal and non-weird except for the
| fact that you're still living. Of course, there's also
| always weird futures besides the non-weird ones. But there
| is no special correlation between overall-weird futures and
| futures where you continue living.
|
| As an analogy, when you throw a coin repeatedly, there will
| be a world where you get tails a million times in a row.
| That doesn't mean that there will be anything else weird in
| that world.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I guess it depends. Maybe there are worlds where, if you
| flipped wrong, humanity all dies horribly.
|
| People alive in _those_ worlds are much more likely to
| see runs of millions of flips than people alive in worlds
| where that 's not true.
|
| If you see a million heads, you might start to worry that
| you're in one of those very strange worlds (where your
| survival depends upon those flips). Maybe there are
| exponentially more worlds where humanity's survival
| depends on flipping heads then there are worlds where you
| just randomly got a million heads.
|
| The other way things might get weird is if you have a run
| of, say, extremely near misses towards nuclear
| apocalypse. The more near misses, the more history has to
| appear to contort to avoid an apocalypse. It's a bad
| sign- it means that your future is likely to involve
| either 1) an apocalypse or 2) an extremely weird
| avoidance of one, that is basically totally
| unpredictable.
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| this will sound super unscientific (because it is) but I've
| always wondered if the body (or life in general) relies upon any
| unknown/undiscovered physical phenomena.
|
| as in, if life is an emergent property of the universe, then
| surely it has all the tools of that universe at its disposal.
| Including ones we don't know about yet.
|
| In the case of this article, it seems like quantum tunneling
| could be damaging to DNA. I wonder if any other aspect of life
| _depends_ on quantum tunneling to function?
|
| /end of gibberish. I'm out of my league here. Just having fun
| speculating.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Read Kant, this isn't unscientific people who believe physics
| has to be the only source of answers are the unscientific ones.
|
| Now claiming to have proof of this and not being able to prove
| it, that's unscientific.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I think Qualia depends on things that are wholly outside the
| realm of physical phenomena, in that they come before physics.
|
| I don't think the two are really in conflict.
|
| That said, all the quantum stuff is incredibly beyond me.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| > this will sound super unscientific (because it is) but I've
| always wondered if the body (or life in general) relies upon
| any unknown/undiscovered physical phenomena.
|
| I strongly disagree that creatively speculating about the
| possible limits of our knowledge is unscientific. This type of
| thinking is essential for scientific discovery. The attitude
| that you are referencing is scientism, which is an irrational
| (and non-scientific) over-confidence in the power of our
| existing knowledge and authority figures in scientific fields.
|
| Indeed, much of the mechanisms behind life remain a mystery,
| and could very well involve undiscovered physics. There's no
| way for us to know yet how much physics remains undiscovered.
| What if there are phenomena as important and fundamental as
| say, electricity that remains to be discovered? To me, as a
| researcher in biotech, I wouldn't be so surprised by such a
| thing, because of how frustratingly unpredictable living
| systems are... it would be fully consistent with what we see to
| have something really really big that we've been missing all
| along.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Chomsky's surprisingly insightful thinking on the limits of
| human knowledge, and the consequences:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0&t=2953s
| emsy wrote:
| Doesn't even have to be an unknown effect, just known effects
| we're not aware are at work would be a huge discovery.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 've always wondered if the body (or life in general) relies
| upon any unknown/undiscovered physical phenomena_
|
| It does. It wasn't that long ago in the human story that we
| didn't know about/believe in viruses, bacteria, hydrogen,
| radiation, and a thousand other things.
|
| It's always amusing to see people on HN claim that there's
| nothing big left to discover because science already has all
| the answers. No, it doesn't. Science is the search for answers.
| michael_j_x wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere about our brain synapses
| exhibiting quantum effects
| NoraCodes wrote:
| > I've always wondered if the body (or life in general) relies
| upon any unknown/undiscovered physical phenomena.
|
| I mean, in the sense that we don't fully understand how many
| parts of cells work, definitely, but probably not in the sense
| of undiscovered physical underpinnings.
|
| > I wonder if any other aspect of life depends on quantum
| tunneling to function?
|
| Possibly! It may help birds navigate by magnetoperception:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01725-1
| edgyquant wrote:
| To be frank "probably" is an exaggeration since we have no
| reason to make a suggestion either way
| leetrout wrote:
| I like to speculate about quantum consciousness and that our
| brains are not closed systems.
| noduerme wrote:
| Well, there was the bees:
| http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263/
|
| and another poster mentioned the birds...
| https://www.wired.com/2011/01/quantum-birds/
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Photosynthesis has long been suggested to be quantum in nature.
|
| https://physicsworld.com/a/is-photosynthesis-quantum-ish/
| gilleain wrote:
| There's a book called 'Quantum Evolution' by Johnjoe McFadden
| that tries to answer the question of what processes in biology
| exploit quantum effects.
|
| An obvious one is photon capture in photosynthesis that seems
| to rely on quantum effects to transfer energy around the
| antenna complex. I'm no doubt mangling that explanation, so see
| :
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology#Photosynthes...
| klabb3 wrote:
| > it seems like quantum tunneling could be damaging to DNA
|
| Copy errors are not the same as damage. Or "the optimal amount
| of copy-errors is non-zero".
| jvm___ wrote:
| Our sense of smell is still unknownish as to how we detect so
| many different smells without clogging up the smell receptors.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| The olfactory system is in fact rather extensively studied.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_receptor_neuron
| robochat wrote:
| There's been some hypotheses of photosynthesis relying on
| quantum effects to improve its efficiency but it's still
| contentious the last that I checked [1].
|
| [1] https://physicsworld.com/a/is-photosynthesis-quantum-ish/
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