The eminent mathematician Pierre Deligne just won the Abel Prize. He first won fame for proving the last of the Weil conjectures, which in turn implied the truth of a conjecture by Ramanujan concerning his tau function. The tau function has a special relationship to 24-dimensional spaces that makes it a frequent ingredient in the probability-amplitude formulae of string theory. But much of string theory descends from M-theory, in which the one-dimensional string is revealed to be a two-dimensional "M2-brane".
Although strings and branes live in high-dimensional spaces, one often concerns oneself with the interior of these objects - one-dimensional for strings, two-dimensional for M2-branes - and describes their interior physics using a similarly low-dimensional field theory.
Now, note that the microtubule has a one-dimensional approximation (as a line) and a two-dimensional approximation (as a cylinder). The propagation of certain degrees of freedom within the shell of the microtubule may therefore have an approximate description in terms of a one- or two-dimensional field theory.
Back in the mid-1990s, Nanopoulos et al proposed to describe microtubules in a one-dimensional approximation (neglecting the radial dimension of the cylinder) using a string worldsheet theory. To my knowledge, no-one ever proposed a holographic uplift of this approximation to a brane worldvolume theory - but this is unsurprising given that the worldvolume theory of the M2-brane wasn't even discovered until the next decade.
Also in the 2000s, it became a common thing to apply string theory, via the AdS/CFT duality, to condensed matter physics; the string models are not exact descriptions of their microscopic physics, but rather offer a model, computationally tractable thanks to the duality, of the quantum-thermodynamic class to which the system of interest belongs.
It would certainly be interesting if, say, a holographic uplift of Weil cohomology played a role in describing the quantum fluctuations of the microtubule according to an effective brane theory. I can even imagine the Ramanujan tau function playing a specific role, as the building block of a fudge factor which gives this effective theory the nice properties (like conformality) of a genuine M-theoretic model, thereby making the physics calculable...
