The Quantum Embryo

The embryo of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster gets patterned after the phenomenon of cell differentiation is triggered by the release of a maternal transcription factor called Bicoid from its anterior pole. The Bicoid gradient plays a key role in this process by providing positional information to cells in a concentration-dependent manner. Timely formation and precise interpretation of the gradient are known to be crucial for the sucessful embryonic development of the organism. Nonetheless, the biophysical mechanisms underlying the whole process are not yet completely understood. Recently, a one-dimensional quantum walk model, based on the hypothesis of transient quantum coherences and unitary noise, has been used to explain the observed multiple dynamic modes of the Bicoid gradient. We here show that the same model can be used to explain the interpretation of the Bicoid gradient by its primary target gene hunchback with the observed precision of ~10% and a time period of less than a second. Furthermore, the said model is also used to explain certain key observations of recent optogenetic experiments concerning the time windows for Bicoid interpretation. Notably, in the same system, we explore the possible existence of a signature of quantum gravity in the low energy regime of particle physics. We conclude that a further theoretical analysis of the process is necessary to identify this signature unambiguously.