PREFERRED. Bathe's lab programs DNA and RNA into custom 2D/3D nanoscale materials (DNA origami via the DAEDALUS algorithm) for applications spanning vaccines/therapeutics, massive molecular data storage, and — most relevant here — using DNA as a programmable scaffold to organize photonic and quantum-optical elements (mimicking quantum coherence effects seen in photosynthetic light-harvesting) and single-molecule optical biosensing.

Benesch combines native mass spectrometry with mass photometry (developed jointly with Philipp Kukura) and other biophysical methods to determine how proteins, including molecular chaperones, assemble, interact and evolve, integrating single-molecule bioanalytical technologies for proteomics.

Curmi is a structural and single-molecule biophysicist whose most-cited work is on the light-harvesting antenna proteins of cryptophyte algae, where he and collaborators reported long-lived electronic coherence at ambient temperature — one of the founding results of the quantum-biology field and still one of its most argued-over. His group determines the structures of these antenna complexes and engineers them, and separately works on protein-based molecular motors and on single-molecule fluorescence and FRET measurements of conformational dynamics. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — Curmi supplies the biological systems in which quantum coherence is actually claimed to matter; a pT/sqrt(Hz)-class spin sensor capable of watching radical-pair or exciton dynamics in situ would be aimed at exactly the questions his structures raise. Preferred attribute present: genuine quantum-biology substrate rather than a quantum-flavoured metaphor.