Every breath you take and every muscle twitch runs on a stream of electrons flowing through proteins inside your cells. These proteins aren't static: they constantly change shape, like a spring that compresses and releases. But until now, no one has seen exactly how these movements open or close the path for electrons. The processes are too small and too fast to be observed with conventional methods.
The new QTOP-trap platform catches a single protein in a laser focus, like tweezers, and simultaneously runs an electric current through it. Positioning accuracy is better than three nanometers (thousands of times thinner than a human hair), and temporal resolution is ten microseconds (the time light takes to travel three kilometers). Thanks to this, scientists have for the first time seen how a switch protein changes its conductivity when it changes shape.
This approach opens the door to studying any electron-carrying protein in its natural environment — in saltwater, like inside a cell. It not only helps us understand how cells store energy, but also hints at how to build electronics inspired by nature.
Electron-carrying proteins can change their conductivity by billions of times when they change shape, like a switch, but at the scale of a single molecule.
In the novel 'The Quantum Thief' by Hannu Rajaniemi, transferring quantum information through protein structures is part of everyday technology.