Summary
Leading scientists, including Nobel laureates, are urging a halt to research on creating “mirror life” microbes, citing “unprecedented risks” to life on Earth.
Mirror microbes, built from reversed molecular structures, could evade natural immune systems, leading to uncontrollable lethal infections.
While mirror molecules hold potential for medical and industrial uses, researchers warn that mirror organisms could escape containment and resist antibiotics.
A 299-page report in Science advocates banning such research until safety can be ensured and calls for global debate on its ethical and ecological implications.
Well that answers my question if mirror cells need mirror molecules.
They just die and break apart turning into mirror molecules. Oh well.
So the biomass of the mirror organisms will not increase in nature?
Depends if the mirror organisms in question can photosynthesize
ooooh this is it! If you wanted to optimize evil add photosynthesis and nitrogen fixing and you’ve got it.
Hell, I’d bet you could work on the chloroplasts in isolation of the rest of the organism to parallel path the research and optimize.
Yes, it cannot be created naturally.
The concern is that if one of the mirror proteins is able to be cloned naturally, then we would have a problem on our hands.
However, those mirror cells would need a supply of “mirror food” such as “mirror sugar” in order to survive their natural lifespan. And then they would need to break apart into the mirror proteins that can be cloned. Racemic drugs like Thalidomide do not behave the way they are talking about in the article.
I have my doubts that this is an actual concern. It’s not even similar to prions - prions are misfolded proteins that have the same chemical make up, but the natural enzymes end up cloning those over the natural ones because they are easier to make.
Agreed. And while deadly, prions don’t spread except through living organisms. It’s not like they’re converting all the proteins in the world without check.
Jumping in down here. I agree with you entirely that racemic mixes are a very different ball than mirror organisms; it’s been a known thing for a long time, and while I’m not positive, I’d be very surprised if FDA testing didn’t include different chiralities of both the original compound and metabolite.
That being said, there’s nothing to say one version of a chiral protein can’t behave like a prion. I don’t know of any evidence where we’ve seen it happen either, though. There’s also potentially the issue of partial bonding. Not every domain on every protein is chiral. If a mirror protein has some domains that bind but other functional domains that are incompatible, you could see it incorporated into complex that either 1) are now non-functional or 2) have alternate folding that behaves similar to prions.
Again though, I can’t point to any evidence of that. You can do the arrow pushing that shows how you get tetrodoxin from the stuff in your tea or coffee, it doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen beyond the statistical realm interesting only to quantum physicists.
Just chiming in because your comments are level headed and you’ve clearly got some knowledge in the area and appreciate the discussion. Looking forward to digging into the report this weekend, I had no idea this was even something are even attempting!
“mirror sugar”. Just dropping some trivia. The first “no calorie” sweetners were actually mirror sugar. They’d activate tastebuds but couldn’t be adsorbed in the gut. Only problem was people crapped their brains out because the osmotic balance went to hell.
edit: I think technically the first zero calorie sugar would have been literal lead (as in Pb) back in the ancient roman days, but I’m not really counting that.
See I didn’t know that, cool thanks
you bet! I just remember that because we were learning about glucose is taken up (it’s an active process swapping sodium and potassium). Another fun bonus for you: thats what they figured out at university of florida (or at least implemented). Someone had the bright idea that if you gave athletes a beverage with not only glucose but the specific K+/Na+ they needed to run the enzymes that took up the glucose, they might perform better.
So the football team, the Gators, got a special concoction of “Gator-aide” at their games. It smelled kinda like sweat, wasn’t sweet (glucose isn’t actually that sweet), so the formula was eventually tweaked, the branding changed to “gatorade”, but the university still RAKES in the money for that license.
edit: Just to add another cool layer. The money to date has nothing to do with the innovation, that patent would have expired (which is fantastic because that concoction is basically how you treat all sorts of things like cholera where the body dies of dehydration despite having clean water, the UN, FEMA, etc basically hands out off-brand gatorade mix). The reason U of florida still gets the money isn’t formula, it’s the brand. Pepsi pays them for that “gator-aide” name. It’s rare IP perfect win; hydration mix for all, and if you there’s a business to be made selling it under a specific name so be it, doesn’t matter much to the person whos life is saved because of “generic hydration mix”.
Mirror molecules that by themselves could easily pose a risk to anyone exposed by them.
My point in even mentioning Thalidomide was that we already know what mirroring even a simple compound can do to living things, nevermind complex proteins and entire organisms.
GMOs can be dangerous as is without proper safeguards, but at least in most instances it’s only the living organism itself that’s dangerous. With mirroring, any part of that organism could be dangerous to normal lifeforms, so even sterilised mirror waste could be dangerous
It’s worth bearing in mind that opposite chirality is not inherently dangerous. Whether an individual mirror molecule poses a problem depends on the specific biochemical context. While there have been famous situations where a chiral enantiomer proved toxic, for every one of these there’s been plenty more instances where biology shrugs and doesn’t gaf.
Does this mean we shouldn’t worry? Obviously not, but it just means we should do more to manage the general risks of molecular engineering for microbes. Chirality is only one of many, many routes through which risks can come, so there’s no point fixating on that.