Investigating encounter dynamics of biomolecular reactions: long-range resonant interactions versus Brownian collisions

Self-organization of living organisms is of an astonishing complexity and efficiency. More specifically, biological systems are the site of a huge number of very specific reactions that require the right biomolecule to be at the right place, at the right time. From a dynamical point of view, this raises the fundamental question of how biomolecules effectively find their target(s); in other words, what forces bring all these specific cognate partners together in an environment as dense and ionized as cellular micro-environments. Here, we investigate the possibility that biomolecules, besides traditional Brownian motion, interact through long-range electromagnetic interactions as predicted from first principles of physics; long-range meaning that the mentioned interactions are effective over distances much larger than the typical dimensions of the molecules involved.