Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
There was a fairly recent issue of the Fantastic Four about this as well.
(where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)
Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
41–50 of 253 posts
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#42Basic 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. Some bacteria have D-amino acids (such as D-alanine) as part of their cell walls (which otherwise contain almost entirely L-amino acids). D-amino acids are also sometimes incorporated into drugs that are synthetic peptide mimics in order to slow metabolism.
d-ala is not incorporated into the protein main sequence (it's part of a D-ala D-lac sugar)
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#43Searching 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…
no. antibodies will work just fine on a d-protein and one of their mechanisms of killing is to generate ozone, which is an achiral molecule.
there is currently ~no risk because generating mirror life is such a monumental task. we dont have a full biological bootstrap sequence currently. even syn1.0 which was a synthetic genome transplant and rebooting operation, required a living host cell to transplant the DNA into, and the genomic dna does go from a computer file, but only the smallest ~100 bp fragments are made by robots and chemistry; intermediate fragments are assembled and amplified in enzyme reactions, bacteria, and yeast.
in principle you could get these to be entirely in vitro, but the yields would be nearly nil. and the expense of mirror dna monomers is... i can't even imagine. you'd probably bankrupt a midsize nation on that. and theres no motivation to decrease the cost because there's not really any other practical use for mirror dna outside of fucking around scientifically. and thats just the DNA. our ability to synthetically make proteins taps out at around 150-200 residues (maybe 2-4x that if you can get clever with native chemical ligation) and the purification and isolation at that length is truly a nightmare, not to mention refolding longer sequences is also hard.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#44How much achiral food would be available for these bacteria anyways in nature? They'd have to compete for it with all other life.
You also have to consider the risk, however small, that mirror bacteria released in the wild survive just long enough to naturally evolve to consume the common chiral form of whatever molecule. We've observed that bacteria can evolve rapidly to changing environments, so it's not out of the question.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#45Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
Not that I recall — closest I can think of would either be TOS evil twin made from antimatter, the mirror universe in general, or Nelix' coffee.
But I have seen it as a short story about how the world ends, some synthetic bacteria that was meant to be reversed chirality for safety, but eventually it went wild and could eat everything without itself being eaten by anything.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#46Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
I also saw a 2-part documentary recently about someone who caught a highly contagious virus (the so called "rage" virus) that led to disastrous consequences. We know these risks are real.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#47So you are saying if by chance a normal bacteria was mutated into chiral/mirror we’d be wiped out? I’m sure there was such events in nature before
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#48[deleted]
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#49So you are saying if by chance a normal bacteria was mutated into chiral/mirror we’d be wiped out? I’m sure there was such events in nature before
Not really possible via mutation. Mutation only impacts the genetic code, swapping chirality means swapping nearly every molecule in the organism all at once.
Re: Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
#50Searching 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 a…
>> Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms.
That sounds like a good thing but... Our food chain starts at the bottom with bacteria turning nutrients into bio-molecules right? These bacteria are eaten by other things going up the food chain ultimately to us. What if some bacteria got loose at that bottom level and started eating all the nutrients with no natural predators? What if it out-competed those with predators? That might be game over for life as we know it.
I'm NOT saying this would happen, just that it one of thousands of possible scenarios one can come up with that go very badly. No one can say with certainty which things would or would not happen.