Crystal jellyfish have an eerie beauty: thanks to a natural protein, they emit a faint green glow. For decades, researchers have used that green fluorescent protein and similar molecules to light up the field of biology, tracking what's happening inside cells. Now these ubiquitous tools are getting a glow-up: their quantum properties are being harnessed to make them similar to the fundamental bits of quantum computing. 'These fluorescent proteins that everybody uses as a fluorescent label can actually be turned into a qubit,' says Peter Maurer, a quantum engineer at the University of Chicago in Illinois. The idea 'sounds very science fiction', says Maurer. But the physics isn't new, and the approach has already been shown to work in principle. Fluorescent-protein labels are currently one of the most important tools in biology laboratories around the world. They can monitor the location and activity of proteins, sense conditions inside a cell, check whether drug candidates are...
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