Abstract
How living systems respond to weak electromagnetic fields represents one of the major unsolved challenges in sensory biology. Recent evidence has implicated cryptochrome, an evolutionarily conserved flavoprotein receptor, in magnetic field responses of organisms ranging from plants to migratory birds. However, whether cryptochromes fulfill the criteria to function as biological magnetosensors remains to be established. Currently, theoretical predictions on the underlying mechanism of chemical magnetoreception have been supported by experimental observations that exposure to radiofrequency (RF) in the MHz range disrupt bird orientation and mammalian cellular respiration. Here we show that, in keeping with certain quantum physical hypotheses, a weak 7 MHz radiofrequency magnetic field significantly reduces the biological responsivity to blue light of the cryptochrome receptor cry1 in Arabidopsis seedlings. Using an in vivo phosphorylation assay that specifically detects activated cryptochrome, we demonstrate that RF exposure reduces conformational changes associated with biological activity. RF exposure furthermore alters cryptochrome-dependent plant growth responses and gene expression to a degree consistent with theoretical predictions. To our knowledge this represents the first demonstration of a biological receptor responding to RF exposure, providing important new implications for magnetosensing as well as possible future applications in biotechnology and medicine.
Highlights
Static magnetic fields have profound and diverse effects on living organisms ranging from prokaryotes to man[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Since cryptochromes have been implicated in responses to static magnetic fields in organisms ranging from plants to humans, a prediction of the radical pair hypothesis is that RF magnetic fields could affect cryptochrome responses
A rapid, quantitative, and direct assay for magnetic sensitivity is the in vivo phosphorylation of Arabidopsis cryptochrome in blue light[10,18]
Summary
Static magnetic fields have profound and diverse effects on living organisms ranging from prokaryotes to man[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. An intriguing feature of the radical pair hypothesis in birds is the theoretical prediction that RF signals in the 1–10 MHz range should elicit the disruption of bird directional responses to the Earth’s magnetic field[13,14,15]. Such disruptive effects were found experimentally for RF fields, remarkably even of intensities below 10 nT9 and, in the case of broad-band fields, below 1 nT16. We explored the intriguing possibility that such fields could trigger a biological response involving Arabidopsis cryptochrome
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