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Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

the-scientist.com

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Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#21

Post by Qem »

conqueso wrote: post #17

Searching HN for "mirror cells", I see at least 1 article warning of the dangers from more than 10 years ago. So, this has been a thing for a while. Any biologists here that can chime in on just how big of a risk they do pose? Is there a general consensus throughout the community that this research should end? Is this something that could be developed for bio-terrorism? Should work be started on developing mirror imm…

Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms. Say, if a predator attacked a mirror bacteria, and ate it, it would be just like eating an inedible microplastic particle. A technological analogue would be to change tensions in electric outlets at random, between 115V and 230V standards, with no indication of which outlet has which tension. People would start blowing equipment left and right.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#22

Post by Filligree »

mr_toad wrote: post #14

I don’t understand why the innate immune response wouldn’t default to attacking an organism made of chiral molecules, since it attacks anything it doesn’t recognise. And while the adaptive immune response might not immediately recognise a novel organism, is there something that would prevent it ever adapting?

I’m sure it would attack it, and it likely would even succeed.

The problem is the chiral molecules would be difficult to clean up. You’d have this anti-life bacteria torn to pieces, yes, but then the pieces get stuck everywhere and potentially jam things.

Personally—not a biologist—it doesn’t feel like a huge risk, given we accept threats such as microplastics which do much the same thing. However, it’s a completely unnecessary threat with essentially no upsides, and it wouldn’t be possible to undo once created.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#25

Post by scotty79 »

joshuaissac wrote: post #5

Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose Once the mirror creature i…

Mirror bacteria evolving the ability to eat normal sugar would be the killer.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#26

Post by VyseofArcadia »

yawpitch wrote: post #20

Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?

There's this meme about how sci-fi cautionary tales fly over people's heads,

> At long last, we have finally created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#27

Post by Jerrrry »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #19
nytesky wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grey goo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo AI paperclips https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem Prions getting into food supply Nuclear holocaust. I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…

Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.

And Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those.

Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#28

Post by odyssey7 »

What’s more realistic in the near-term is that conventional gain-of-function research creates a terrible, conventional bacterium that’s more deadly than Ebola and resistant to all of the antibiotics that we mass produce.

If there was an advantage to being opposite-handed, some bacterium would have done it by now. The article even says that researchers just found out that e-coli can consume different-handed food.

I’m guessing that the first discovery in this area, the ambi-vory of e-coli, is not really all that unique. Medical and biological science is still just scratching the surface. They’re still cataloguing new components of human anatomy, things you could have found with a microscope centuries ago… It is highly unlikely that out of the universe of billions of years of bacteria, e-coli is the singular organism that went down this route to the furthest extent that was advantageous. The fact that they found one example with their limited resources tells me that this is not so improbable.

The fear-mongering just sounds like a funding push to me. The basic research will be enriching for humanity, if it doesn’t create the very thing from which it purports to save us, though I’m thinking this messaging is a bit out there. Could you engineer a super-bioweapon this way? Probably. But there are easier ways to do that with information that’s already in the textbooks.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#29

Post by PhasmaFelis »

exe34 wrote: post #15
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.

but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?

If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.

Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn

#30

Post by _yb2s »

ethbr1 wrote: post #24

Basic biochemistry question (you can tell what I didn't study in uni) Is it possible to mix chirality in, say, a protein? I.e. have a portion of one chirality and another of the other?

Yes, that can be created in principle, but you would need to modify the natural machinery (ribosome and tRNA) to make it possible.
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