Quantum Biology: an overview of current experimental and theoretical studies

In this talk I will present an overview of the transdisciplinary field of quantum biology (QB). Both experimental and theoretical studies recently performed by several research groups indicate that biological phenomena such as photosynthesis in plants, avian magnetoreception, as well as vision and olfaction in the living organisms take place through nontrivial quantum mechanical effects (e.g. quantum coherence). A challenge for physicists and chemists working on these QB problems is to understand how such effects may take place at room temperature and in the wet biological environments where decoherence is expected to dominate.