Yes, tryptophan is in turkey. It's one of many amino acids the body uses to build proteins. This article has nothing to do with that aspect of tryptophan and instead focuses on something much stranger: the behavior of huge networks of tryptophan found in biological structures like microtubules. Tryptophan absorbs ultraviolet light and can then emit some of that energy as light (aka fluorescence). Many proteins contain tryptophan, and in some biological structures, enormous numbers of tryptophan molecules are arranged in regular patterns. The researchers asked: when thousands or even hundreds of thousands of these molecules are arranged together, do they interact with light individually—or can they behave collectively? The paper I love presents evidence that when huge numbers of tryptophan molecules are organized inside these cellular structures, they can exhibit collective quantum optical behavior called superradiance, rather than simply behaving as thousands of independent molecules. And this is the part that fascinates me: maintaining large-scale collective quantum effects in warm, wet, noisy biological environments should be extremely difficult because those environments tend to destroy quantum coherence. Yet the researchers found that the predicted superradiant behavior was surprisingly resistant to thermal and structural disorder, and their experiments with microtubules in aqueous solution at thermal equilibrium produced fluorescence changes consistent with the theory. That's about as briefly as I can summarize it and still feel like I've made any sense at all. Haha.
