Title: A Quantum Model of Allosteric Signalling as a Non-Markovian Effect

Abstract: Allosteric regulation is a central process in biology where binding at one site of a protein has a reversible action at a distance on another functional site. While many questions about the microscopic mechanisms of allostery remain open, many models point to structural (vibrational) dynamics as the carriers of allosteric signals. These degrees of freedom also constitute the primary environments leading to dissipative effects in molecular quantum systems, but inclusion of functional signalling mediated by environments has not been widely studied in open quantum systems. Here we present an allostery-inspired quantum mechanical model where reversible quantum state transitions and environmental energy harvesting are both triggered and controlled by the environmental dynamics induced by a remote two-level system. By employing numerically exact methods based on matrix product state representations of the entire system-environment wave function, we directly demonstrate how the non-perturbative, non-Markovian nature of these dissipative dynamics reproduce a range of features known in biological allostery, potentially opening a path for the exploitation of dissipative signalling in future quantum technologies and nanomaterials.