Biologically, there exist two kinds of syntheses: photosynthesis and ATP-driven biosynthesis. The light harvesting of photosynthesis is known to achieve an efficiency of ∼ 95% by the quantum energy transfer of photons. However, how the ATP-driven biosynthesis reaches its high efficiency still remains unknown. Deoxynucleotide triphosphates (dNTPs) in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) adopt the identical way of ATP to release their energy, and thus can be employed to explore the ATP energy process. Here, using a gold nanoparticle (AuNP) enhanced PCR (AuNP-PCR), we demonstrate that the energy released by phosphoanhydride-bond (PB) hydrolysis of dNTPs is in form of photons (PB-photons) to drive DNA replication, by modulating their resonance with the average inter-AuNP distance (D). The experimental results show that both the efficiency and yield of PCR periodically oscillate with D increasing, indicating a quantized process, but not simply a thermal one. The PB-photon wavelength is further determined to 8.4 µm. All these results support that the release, transfer and utilization of bioenergy are in the form of photons. Our findings of ATP-energy quantum conversion will open a new avenue to the studies of high-efficiency bioenergy utilization, biochemistry, biological quantum physics, and even brain sciences.

从生物学上讲，存在两种合成：光合作用和ATP驱动的生物合成。众所周知，光合作用的光收集通过光子的量子能量转移达到约95％的效率。然而，ATP驱动的生物合成如何达到其高效仍然未知。聚合酶链反应（PCR）中的脱氧核苷酸三磷酸（dNTPs）采用相同的ATP释放能量的方式，因此可用于探索ATP能量过程。在这里，我们使用金纳米颗粒（AuNP）增强PCR（AuNP-PCR），证明dNTPs的磷酸酐键（PB）水解释放的能量是以光子（PB-photons）的形式通过调节DNA驱动复制它们与平均AuNP间距离（D）的共振。D增加，表示量化的过程，而不仅仅是简单的热过程。PB光子的波长进一步确定为8.4μm。所有这些结果都支持生物能的释放，转移和利用是光子形式。我们对ATP能量量子转换的发现将为高效生物能源利用，生物化学，生物量子物理学乃至脑科学的研究开辟一条新途径。