Wavefunction Patterns the Embryo?

The problem of cell fate determination by morphogen gradients in the embryonic development of many multicellular organisms has been a long-standing and important one in developmental biophysics and dynamics. The first mathematical model was proposed by Francis Crick over 50 years ago by postulating a reaction-diffusion based mechanism underlying the whole process. The first real world morphogen, named Bicoid (Bcd), was identified by molecular biologists in late 1980s in the embryo of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster . Subsequently, Crick’s classical random walk based model was used by biophysicists to explain the formation of Bicoid and other morphogen gradients. Very recently Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) studies have revealed multiple modes of Bcd transport at different spatial and temporal locations across the embryo of Drosophila melanogaster. It has been be shown that these observations are best fitted by a model based on quantum mechanics. In such a model it is hypothesized that the transitory quantum coherences in collaboration with unitary noise are responsible for the observed dynamics and relaxation to a non-equilibrium steady-state of the Bcd morphogen gradient. In this paper, in addition to further clarifying the mathematical details underlying the quantum-classical model, we use the said model to explain the observed Bcd interpretation time by its primary target gene Hunchback ( hb ).