A Thermal Study of Terahertz Induced Protein Interactions

TL;DR

The paper addresses how terahertz radiation, when tuned to a protein’s vibrational resonance, can be converted into local heat via resonant absorption, effectively turning proteins into thermal nanosensors within an intra-body network. It develops a Goldenberg–Tranter heat diffusion framework to quantify the transient temperature rise $\Delta T$ from a heated protein sphere using $Q_v=\frac{C_{abs} I}{v_p}$ and analyzes dependencies on power, pulse duration, and inter-particle spacing, linking temperature to the opening probability of thermally gated channels. The authors derive and simulate the kinetics of channel activation with a two-state model, incorporating $K$ and $P_{open}$ relations and temperature- and voltage-dependent forms, and validate results through MATLAB, COMSOL, and an experimental proof-of-concept at $f=130$ GHz. The findings show that resonant THz heating can selectively elevate local temperatures and modulate TRP, K2P, and HCN channels, offering a pathway to engineer intra-body signal processing with tunable spatial and temporal scales for biomedical applications.

Abstract

Proteins can be regarded as thermal nanosensors in an intra-body network. Upon being stimulated by Terahertz (THz) frequencies that match their vibrational modes, protein molecules experience resonant absorption and dissipate their energy as heat, undergoing a thermal process. This paper aims to analyze the effect of THz signaling on the protein heat dissipation mechanism. We therefore deploy a mathematical framework based on the heat diffusion model to characterize how proteins absorb THz-electromagnetic (EM) energy from the stimulating EM fields and subsequently release this energy as heat to their immediate surroundings. We also conduct a parametric study to explain the impact of the signal power, pulse duration, and interparticle distance on the protein thermal analysis. In addition, we demonstrate the relationship between the change in temperature and the opening probability of thermally-gated ion channels. Our results indicate that a controlled temperature change can be achieved in an intra-body environment by exciting protein particles at their resonant frequencies. We further verify our results numerically using COMSOL Multiphysics and introduce an experimental framework that assesses the effects of THz radiation on protein particles. We conclude that under controlled heating, protein molecules can serve as hotspots that impact thermally-gated ion channels. Through the presented work, we infer that the heating process can be engineered on different time and length scales by controlling the THz-EM signal input.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: A visualization of the simulation setup.
• Figure 2: Temperature change versus nano-laser power for lysozyme protein particles.
• Figure 3: Temperature change versus frequency for lysozyme protein particles.
• Figure 4: Temperature increase versus inter-particle distance.
• Figure 5: Temperature increase versus pulse duration.