Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 13, 2026

Submillisecond Conformational Changes in Proteins Resolved by Photothermal Beam Deflection
Published on: February 18, 2014
Biological effects of electromagnetic fields--mechanisms for the effects of pulsed microwave radiation on protein
J A Laurence1, P W French, R A Lindner
1School of Physics, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
Abstract:
Microwave exposure under "athermal" conditions occurs when no temperature rise can be measured by conventional thermometry. The existence of biological effects arising from the athermal exposure is still controversial, partly because of a lack of the linear dose response relation. We propose a model in which pulsed microwave radiation causes a triggering of the heat shock or stress response by altering the conformation of proteins through a transient heating of the protein and its close environment. We support this by modelling using the heat diffusion equation and show that pulsed exposure even when athermal can lead to transient temperature excursions outside the normal range. We propose that the power window phenomenon in which biological effects are observed at low power levels may be caused by an incomplete triggering of the heat shock response.
Related Concept Videos
Biological Effects of Radiation
Protein Denaturation
Spontaneous and Induced Mutations
Mutations
Chromosomal Alterations Are Large-Scale Mutations
While point mutations are changes in a single nucleotide in...
Proteomics
Proteomics is the study of proteomes' function. It involves the large-scale systematic study of the proteome to denote the protein complement expressed by a genome. Scientist Mark Wilkins coined the term proteomics...
Covalently Linked Protein Regulators
These groups modify specific amino acids in a protein.