Yesterday marked the kickoff for the BBSRC’s funded Strategic Longer and Larger (sLoLa) scheme “Revealing Nature’s Quantum Compass”1. The sLoLa grants are a laudable endeavor by the UK government to fund “ambitious research projects that will deepen our understanding of life’s most fundamental processes”. It is wonderful to see the UK government taking seriously the importance of blue sky basic research, appreciating that asking deep questions is what drives scientific progress, often leading to unexpected breakthroughs with application down the line.
At the kickoff event, principal investigators presented on what their research can bring to the table. Much like entering a bakery2 where everything smells delicious and it seems impossible to choose, an overwhelming range of experimental and computational techniques were presented, each bringing to bear their own unique approach to tackling the outstanding problem: mechanistically, how is that birds (and other animals) can navigate distances up to thousands of kilometers using the Earth’s magnetic field. Alongside this, my own group is interested in how we can develop biotechnologies that take advantage of magnetic field sensitive biochemistry, which has a host of applications near and long term.
The challenge of linking the biochemistry of a single protein known to be magnetic field sensitive to a behavioral phenotype will require a highly interdisciplinary approach, and excitingly for this community, machine learning is being involved from the start. Prof. Degiacomi, a member of the core team, presented how his lab is developing ML techniques to reduce the computational burden of linking experimental results to protein dynamics informed by molecular dynamics simulation. On the flip-side, I hope such techniques will develop into methods we can use for design. Similar to enzymes, the proteins we are interested have a function depending on mechanisms far more complex than only structure and binding (not to trivialize either of these!). Magnetic field sensing in this context depends on creating an environment in which quantum entanglement can exist, and being able to transduce the state of this quantum entanglement into into a biological signal – thus far this second step in particular has remained highly elusive.
Ultimately, the day concluded with much enthusiasm and excitement for all that is to come. Watch this space!
- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-11-19-new-project-aims-reveal-nature-s-quantum-compass ↩︎
- Yes, I just returned from a symposium in Germany ↩︎
