Nonspecific biological effects of weak magnetic fields depend on molecular rotations

TL;DR

This paper presents a physical model explaining nonspecific biological magnetic effects through the precession of magnetic moments in rotating molecules, aligning with recent experimental observations.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum mechanical model linking molecular rotations and magnetic moments to nonspecific magnetic effects in biology, extending previous experimental findings.

Findings

Magnetic moments in rotating molecules can be slowed, affecting biological responses.

Quantum level crossings explain magnetic field dependence of effects.

Model aligns with experimental data on plant gene expression under magnetic fields.

Abstract

The radical pair mechanism is a leading hypothesis in animal magnetic navigation. This mechanism associates the magnetic sense with the visual system, the radical pairs in cryptochromes of the eye retina being specialized magnetic receptors that modulate rhodopsin-mediated photoreception. There are also nonspecific magnetic effects in biology, which occur mostly by chance and originate from the interaction of weak magnetic fields with the magnetic moments dispersed all over the organism at the microscopic level. The radical pair mechanism cannot explain this type of response for many reasons. We have previously shown that the above interaction has a finite probability of resulting in an observable. Here, we develop our physical model of nonspecific magnetic effects for the case of magnetic moments located in rotating molecules. We generalize the results of recent experiments on gene expression in plants in a constant magnetic field, and show that the precession of the magnetic moments that reside on rotating molecules can be slowed relative to the immediate biophysical structures. In quantum mechanical language, the crossing of the quantum levels of magnetic moments conjointly with molecular rotations explain nonspecific magnetic effects and leads to magnetic field-dependences that are in good agreement with the experiment.