[HN Gopher] Quantum tunneling makes DNA more unstable ___________________________________________________________________ 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/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-21 23:00 UTC)