New understanding about the energetics of muscle contraction

The FB post of Robert Stonjek told about a popular article in Phys Org (see this) about the modelling of unexpected findings related to muscle contraction (see the Nature article). The article is very interesting from the point of view of TGD inspired quantum biology (see for instance this).

Muscle contraction requires energy. From the article one learns that the contraction is not actually well-understood. The interesting finding is that the rate of muscle contraction correlates with the rate of water flow through the muscle. As if the water flow would provide the energy needed by the contraction. How? This is not actually well-understood. This is only one example of the many failures of naive reductionism in recent biology.

TGD suggests a very general new physics mechanism for how a biosystem can gain metabolic energy.

1. One can start from biocatalysis, whose extremely rapid rate is a complete mystery in the framework of standard biochemistry. The energy wall which reactants must overcome makes the reactions extremely slow. A general mechanism of energy liberation allowing us to get over the wall, should exist. The reactants should also find each other in the molecular crowd.
2. The first problem is that one does not understand how reactants find each other. The magnetic monopole flux tubes, carrying phases of ordinary matter with effective Planck constant h_eff>h behaving like dark matter, make the living system a fractal network with molecules, cells, etc at the nodes. The U-shaped flux tubes acting as tentacles allow the reactant molecules to find each other: a resonance occur when the U-shaped flux tubes touching each other have same magnetic value of magnetic field and same thickness, a cyclotron resonance occurs, they reconnect to form a pair of flux tubes connecting the molecules. Molecules have found each other.
3. At the next step h_eff decreases and the connecting flux tube pair shortens. This liberates energy since the length of the flux tube pair increases with h_eff. Quite generally the increase of h_eff requires energy feed, and in biosystems this means metabolic energy feed. The liberated energy makes it possible to overcome the energy barrier making the reaction slow.
4. This mechanism applied to the monopole flux tubes associated with water clusters and bioactive molecules is a basic mechanism of the immune system and allows the organism to find bioactive molecules which do not belong to the system normally. Cyclotron frequency spectrum of the biomolecule serves as the fingerprint of the molecule. This is also the basic mechanism of water memory.

In muscle contraction, the flow of water involving these contracting flux tubes would liberate the energy needed by contraction and the process would be very fast. The water flowing through the muscle is a fuel carrying energy at its monopole flux tubs with h_eff>h. The energy is used and water becomes ordinary. The rate of the flow correlates with the rate of contraction and with the rate of the needed metabolic energy feed.

The interesting question is whether this mechanism reduces to the usual ATP-ADP mechanism in some sense or whether ATP-ADP mechanism is a special case of this mechanism

See for instance the article TGD view about water memory and the notion of morphogenetic field.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.