The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads.
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
> The trouble with mirror cells is that they could probably evade most of the barriers that keep ordinary organisms in check. To fight off pathogens, for example, our bodies must first detect them with molecular sensors.
> Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from their immune systems.
It’s clear that RNA wouldn’t be complementary to mirror RNA, but antibody binding is more complex than RNA hybridization. Is it a foregone conclusion that antibodies couldn’t bind to mirror antigens?
(Degrading mirror proteins, as mentioned elsewhere in OP, does seem like a bigger obstacle.)
Antibodies can bind to wrong-handed antigens, but an antibody to a correct-handed antigen would not automatically bind the mirror. I'm not finding a lot of literaturee about this, however.
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.
Well, not anything. I have glass embedded in my foot which isn't being attacked, for example, and there are plenty of examples of biocompatible polymers, many of them already used in medical implants.
(By the way, all organisms are made of chiral molecules; what we're talking about is reversing the chirality.)
Some of the things the immune system uses to attack things, such as superoxide, would work fine on mirror organisms. Others, such as antibodies to existing organisms, wouldn't work at all. I don't know what the balance is.
Stuff binds to other stuff because the magnetic domains and shape match up well enough.
There is no way to effect something that attacks everything it doesn't recognize because a) there is no ooeration that represents not matching and b) if there was such a cell would be a short lived bomb that would blow up your body.
You adaptive immune system learns to and antigen when a short lived immune cell is semi randomly generated that binds to it and becomes a longer lived cell.
Presumably this could still happen but this normally takes days to happen. In between your inate immune system relies on being able to recognize a lot of existing antigens that are out there and common in attackers.
Having the entire library of malicious life become magically unknown means that you are relying on only your adaptive immune system is available to contain the damage.
If this is such a powerful niche for an organism to be in, why haven't they already emerged naturally over the 3 billion year history of life on earth?
But I also think it's similar in a way to 'why matter and not antimatter' or 'why ~3d space rather than no structure' (much less obvious the second one!).
But I think the real answer here is touched-on by nmstoker in a sibling comment: We're so far down the energy-gradient of the current-default-chirality on earth, that it would take exploration of an insanely-deep valley for all molecules in a cell (there are zillions even in a bacteria!) to flip the the whole thing to the alternate chirality.
It's a bit like the idea that a good chunk of matter (like even a whole amino acid) could all spontaneously-convert to antimatter at once, sure it's possible in theory but the chances are so low we might as well say it's impossible.
Life forms are effectively locked into the current set of chiral molecules. For a cell to flip, it would need all the corresponding mirror changes to happen as well, since the behaviours are interlinked - this makes it something that would be highly unlikely to occur due to evolution and why it's only realistic if carried out by people all at once.
I remember learning about chirality from an Isaac Asimov article about “left-handed” sugar which, while it tastes the same as normal sugar, is unable to be metabolized by our digestive systems. I would imagine that something similar would come into play with a left-handed organism: it would be unable to consume right-handed nutrients so would starve to death. Overall, my assumption is that mirror bacteria would be unable to interact in any significant way with non-mirror organisms, but being somebody whose expertise begins and ends with reading an Isaac Asimov article on the subject as a 10-year-old, I’m very open to the possibility that I may be wrong.
its not a powerful niche. theres just no food available. even autotrophs and prototrophs scavenge for fully formed chiral building blocks if possible because building ftom scratch is more energy intensive than recycling
That's sensationalism. Mirror bacteria would be at a severe disadvantage as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids. And there are much much more normal bacteria than any possible mirror bacteria. They would be wiped out pretty quickly.
I thought the same thing initially, but I'm not as convinced after looking a bit more into it. Ie I think it's a possible risk.
>as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids.
There are and they already have:
>D-amino acids are toxic for life on Earth. Yet, they form constantly due to geochemical racemization and bacterial growth (the cell walls of which contain D-amino acids), raising the fundamental question of how they ultimately are recycled. This study provides evidence that bacteria use D-amino acids as a source of nitrogen by running enzymatic racemization in reverse. Consequently, when soils are inundated with racemic amino acids, resident bacteria consume D- as well as L-enantiomers, either simultaneously or sequentially depending on the level of their racemase activity. Bacteria thus protect life on Earth by keeping environments D-amino acid free.
On the one hand, this does indicate that the "mirror bacteria" might not starve immediately, but on the other hand it shows that "non-mirror bacteria" would already be there in large numbers.
I reckon I generally agree that it's very unlikely that mirror-bacteria would be viable in the wild!
This is covered in the article in 2 ways though: It says that some nutrients (like glycerol) are achiral - this might mean they could still find a food source in a regular-chirality world. It also mentions that the mirror-bacterial nonstandard-chirality might 'cloak' them from regular-chirality predators (or immune-systems).
I dunno, it does seem pretty far-fetched and I am not a professional scientist so I find it hard to evaluate the risk in any worthwhile way.. but I think it still seems worth considering?
Bacteria can often synthesize all 20 amino acids themselves if they have enough carbon and nitrogen. They don't need to ingest existing amino acids from the environment.
How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it;
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.
And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.
Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.
How would we test that the mirror antibiotics actually work without developing mirror organisms and exposing ourselves to the associated risks?
They aren’t going to be mirror copies of terrestrial organisms, there’s no guarantee that mirror copies of our antibiotics will work (AFAIK it’s actually very unlikely). Protein binding sites change when mirrored because it’s not just mirror image but a change in how the proteins twist when folding, which is why most of them are sensitive to chirality. Only very simple molecules are likely to behave the same.
Stuff like bleach will still work by denaturing proteins and disrupting the bilipid layer in cell membranes but anything like tetracycline and penicilin that targets peptidoglycan enzymes or ribosomes or other complex biochemistry almost certainly won’t.
Reading through the report, the trouble turns out to be that "devastating disease for humans" is possibly the least of our problems. Even if we had a perfect stockpile of antibiotics that would protect humans against any possible mirror organism (we'd need a wide variety, right?), all of our crops and livestock would be wiped out. All the forests. All the plankton. It would be really bad.
"The baddies will use this as a weapon, so we need to get ahead of this, and manufacture the nastiest variants we can come up, so that we know how to DEFEND against them. It's defense, I say!"... Then eventually there is a lab leak, and there is a pandemic on your hand.
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 immune system cells, just in case?
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.
A completely "mirrored" organism is not that dangerous.
- It would still have antigenic properties, just not the ones we are familiar with, because antigens are proteins or proteins bound to sugars. Both have "left" vs "right" variants.
- It can't eat any ordinary food, except simple fats. Common proteins and sugars won't fit it's enzymes. That means it can't digest sugars, proteins or any combination that contains them. It also means it can't attack and decompose our tissues, so it would have no way to enter our bodies.
- With only simple lipids as food, it would need to take all Nitrogen from the atmosphere or inorganic compounds, which means it can't really be a pathogen for humans (or any animals) even if it could somehow enter our organisms. However, it could live on the soil and possibly be a plant pathogen.
- It's "mirrored" toxins won't have any effect on us. (But compounds that are normally benign possibly could be toxic if "mirrored" - I can't say for sure if it's possible.)
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.
So thats why we were made to extract fossil fuels and "dispose" plastic and research bacteria. Hope Life 2.0 writes footnotes about biped cities making plastic mines like we write about Jurassic shellfish providing soil suitable for US cotton.
I life has to completely restart on this planet, there probably won't be time for things as complex as us to evolve again before the sun turns into a red giant.
Why wouldn't it work in the other direction though? The mirror cells would be competing for the same ambidextrous resources (for my lack of a better term). Sugar is chiral isnt it? Would they be able to digest normal chiral resources?
pick up your house key, hold it in front of a mirror, look at the key, and the reflection. you should notice the side of key away from mirror is visible, the reflection shows the other side of key .
so the sides of key, and reflection are switched relative to the key.
if you could somhow pluck the reflection from a mirror and try to use it, the left side is right, and right side is left.
when this happens with molecules, there is different parts of the molecules being brought together, leading to alternate interactions, thus different reaction path
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.
Seems like some kind of achiral algae would actually be the most dangerous.
People forget that blue-green algae caused a global climate apocalypse, polluted the oceans and atmosphere with deadly oxygen, caused all exposed iron to rust massively changing ocean chemistry, and threw the entire globe into an ice-age that lasted 300 million years.
I wonder how we would stop something like that. It'd be like the algae bloom from hell. Plankton likely wouldn't be very successful in attempting to eat it.
Besides the achiral glycerol mentioned in the article, some bacteria subsist on methane. That is also non-chiral and in large quantity in petroleum and under the sea.
If you have the technological proficiency to synthesize mirror chemistry cells from scratch, I'm hoping that implies you also have the ability to engineer e.g. bacteria that feed on reverse chirality molecules & turn them back into standard form, or create other mitigations. Safer not to make them at all though.
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 is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.
The report suggests releasing mirror phages, but they could only control the bacteria, not eliminate them. And they would likely evolve resistance so we'd have to somehow boot up an entire ecosystem of phages to keep things under control.
This reminds me of the different foods in Anathem; the different people (Trying to keep this spoiler-free.) are unable to digest the the foods the others eat.
There needs to be an international body established to set standards and limitations on biological research, and it's edicts should be enforced very aggressively.
Unfortunately, even in the aftermath of a massive global disruption directly due to the creation of organisms which are supernaturally able to defeat human immune systems, it's still the wild west. There's effectively very little limitations on research that could quite literally end humanity and disrupt all life on earth, and the limitations that do exist are actively skirted, ignored with violations covered up after the fact.
I think it is reasonable to assume that the immune system would have to work harder against mirror pathogens. Straight toxicity might be another important consideration.
On the other hands mirror amino acids already exist in nature, so I find the argument that a mirror bacteria would rampage the ecosystem unchecked sensationalist. Click-bait even. More likely than not, the mirror bacteria itself would be heavily outcompeted in the wild.
Agreed that modelling it as a "pathogen" is missing the mark.
But predatorless photosynthetic self-replicating gray goo that grows exponentially across the planet, resulting in a drastic change in CO2 and oxygen levels across the globe? Wouldn't be the first time. [1]
Also: in all risk analysis you'd have to consider the upside. The upside here is none. We are 99.9% sure that there's nothing special about our side of the mirror. So with 0 upside besides "writing a paper" or "because no one has done it, so who knows?", it doesn't really matter that the risk may be small. It just doesn't make sense to do it.
Clarke warned us, in "2061: Odissey 3" (Beware: spoilers):
> The doctor seemed to be struggling for words.
'What, dammit?'
'Something came up out, of the water, Like a parrot beak, but about a hundred times bigger. It took -
Rosie - with one snap, and disappeared. We have some impressive company here; even if we could
breathe outside, I certainly wouldn't recommend swimming -'
'Bridge to Captain,' said the officer on duty, 'Big disturbance in the water - camera three - I'll give you
the picture.'
'That's the thing I saw!' cried the doctor. He felt a sudden chill at the inevitable, ominous thought: I hope it's not back for
more.
Suddenly, a vast bulk broke through the surface of the ocean and arched into the sky. For a moment,
the whole monstrous shape was suspended between air and water.
The familiar can be as shocking as the strange - when it is in the wrong place. Both captain and doctor
exclaimed simultaneously: 'It's a shark!'
There was just time to notice a few subtle differences - in addition to the monstrous parrot-beak -
before the giant crashed back into the sea. There was an extra pair of fins - and there appeared to be no
gills. Nor were there any eyes, but on either side of the beak there were curious protuberances that might
be some other sense organs.
'Convergent evolution, of course,' said the doctor. 'Same problems, same solutions, on any planet.
Look at Earth. Sharks, dolphins, ichthyosaurs - all oceanic predators must have the same basic design.
That beak puzzles me, though -'
'What's it doing now?'
The creature had surfaced again, but now it was moving very slowly, as if exhausted after that one
gigantic leap. In fact, it seemed to be in trouble - even in agony; it was beating its tail against the sea,
without attempting to move in any definite direction.
Suddenly, it vomited its last meal, turned belly up, and lay wallowing lifelessly in the gentle swell.
'Oh my God,' whispered the Captain, his voice full of revulsion. 'I think I know what's happened.'
'Totally alien biochemistries,' said the doctor; even he seemed shaken by the sight. 'Rosie's claimed
one victim, after all.'
The Sea of Galilee was
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.
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.
The claim that mirror molecules would not be subject to immune surveillance makes no sense to me. The immune system is happy to react to non-biological molecules. It reacts to shapes, not chirality. It is a separate question whether the immune response could break into mirror membranes and break down mirror molecules.
The pMHC-TCR complex, which is the cornerstone of the adaptive immune system, has evolved to bind peptide epitopes.
Most D-amino acids are known to bind MHC poorly and lead to reduced TCR recognition. I imagine this could increase the chances of evading immune surveillance.
Are you certain? The immune system detects molecules partly due to their shape, i.e. where binding points are on the proteins. I can imagine it being the case where the immune system's proteins no longer match up with the invader's because of the mirroring.
If you 3d print a mirrored house key, the bitting may line up with the original, but the warding wouldn't fit anymore. I think that's a reasonable analogy to the way proteins match up.
Most parts of the innate immune system recognize specific shapes like nucleic acids, while the adaptive immune system is more flexible in what it can recognize.
I don't quite understand the meaning of your comment, it reads to me like "one time people worried about something but their worries were unfounded" with the subtext/implication that "therefore we don't need to worry" - about this? Or maybe need to worry in general? Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?
No discussion of Peter Watts' Rifters should omit a clear content warning.
It's full of his own fetish, misogynistic sadism, and without kink shaming, I can say this makes these books—which are otherwise interesting and memorable—literally unrecommendable.
This is just Open Philanthropy laundering weird billionaire concerns again. The same people who decided they really needed to warn the world about garage borne designer pandemics (by totally misunderstanding what DNA actually is and does).
Indeed, looking at the sponsors, it's not at all surprising to see that Open Philanthropy is behind it... both directly and indirectly. Moreover, they're trying to hide that fact by burying the reference deep in the supplementary materials behind others AND hiding the fact that their people are in charge of the other involved 'non-profit' organizations. 70+ Scientists don't come together on something like this without a lot of help. We should have better transparency standards for large science publications like this. Seems that neither "Open Phil" nor "Open AI" are being very Open about anything these days. Pitty.
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.
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.
You can make these things in a lab. However Phind said "In summary, while scientists have proposed various models for how biological homochirality may have emerged, there is currently no known example of mixed protein chirality occurring in nature. Biological molecules appear to exhibit almost exclusive homochirality at the molecular level."
it is possible to have mixed chirality in syntheic proteins. (see michael weiss work investigating insulin receptor binding to insulin)
its basically impossible (but not totally impossible) for a living creature to be able to generate any protein with mixed chiralities.
this is because a ribosome with a chamber that can support both chiralities is likely to be less efficient at protein extension. but also you need so much more trna if you want to support arbitrary d-amino acids, etc.
Not sure what you mean by "in a protein", but if you have a solution of some chiral chemical compound such that there's 50% of the L-enantiomer and 50% of the R-enantiomer, you get what's called a "racemic" mixture. So, yes -- mixing chirality is possible in at least one sense.
Not really possible via mutation. Mutation only impacts the genetic code, swapping chirality means swapping nearly every molecule in the organism all at once.
Doesn't sound very scary on the face of it. Apparently [0] the problem with Thalidomide was that the chirality could spontaneously reverse, so that sort of thing must happen frequently in nature. If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring under evolutionary pressure it probably doesn't actually have any advantages over following the herd.
> that sort of thing must happen frequently in nature
Individual chiral molecules can happen naturally, sure, but not entire organisms. From the report: In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images.
In the fitness landscape there is an absolutely enormous gulf between standard and mirror bacteria, large enough that no amount of incremental evolutionary pressure could flip the ~billion chiral bonds in a given bacterium simultaneously.
I think the ostensibly scary subject here is mirror DNA or RNA, not anything-that-doesn't-self-replicate.
> If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring
It's unclear bacteria have ever "attempted" it. The synthesis of DNA is incredibly intricate and complex, and the set of proteins that do it are believed only to have ever evolved once. In order for a bacteria to have "attempted" this, it would have to evolve an entirely new set of proteins from scratch.
Personally I think a self-replicating photosynthetic cell with mirror DNA is as scary as self-replicating photosynthetic plastic.
My go-to with any 'thing x could wipe out everything or is better than everything' is exactly this. If nature hasn't found it then I don't worry as much. That doesn't mean this shouldn't be considered and studied carefully, but this sounds like a bit more fear than it likely deserves.
Now we have another candidate to explain the Fermi paradox. Mirror Biology Armageddon. Even if life outside runs on alternative biochemistry, the odds are that some of its building blocks are chiral too, and subjected to the same risks in case the indigenous intelligent lifeform advances to the point of making mirror life.
The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)
Related:
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)
Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.
Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].
The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.
This is so impressive that it's achievable, I maybe morbidly was imagining if we were to be wiped out due to this and another species were able to evolve to study how we died, would they come across these mirror Bacteria and believe they were natural. It all has very "Death Stranding" tones but I'm not a biologist by any means.
sounds like another NIH grant is going to be given to a shell nonprofit to move the research to a "BSL4" (honest, we don't reuse paper towels) lab somewhere in China.
In the mean time, they tried using mRNA vaccines that did mimic our own mRNA, but they caused immune reaction. Substituting a different nucleoside and made the vaccine more stable. The way pseudouridine is used in mRNA vaccines isn't found in nature, ergo people who have been vaccinated are already carrying around bit bit of a form of life never seen before on the planet.
> A large number of the individual nucleotides in a tRNA molecule may be chemically modified, often by methylation or deamidation. These unusual bases sometimes affect the tRNA's interaction with ribosomes and sometimes occur in the anticodon to alter base-pairing properties.
philipkglass|1 year ago
"Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks"
https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads.
https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
https://rifters.com/real/author.htm
I see that a substack author has written about this "second kingdom of life" today, under the catchy heading "green goo":
https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished
And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
mattclarkdotnet|1 year ago
seizethegdgap|1 year ago
selimthegrim|1 year ago
divbzero|1 year ago
> Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from their immune systems.
It’s clear that RNA wouldn’t be complementary to mirror RNA, but antibody binding is more complex than RNA hybridization. Is it a foregone conclusion that antibodies couldn’t bind to mirror antigens?
(Degrading mirror proteins, as mentioned elsewhere in OP, does seem like a bigger obstacle.)
dekhn|1 year ago
doctoboggan|1 year ago
mr_toad|1 year ago
And while the adaptive immune response might not immediately recognise a novel organism, is there something that would prevent it ever adapting?
Filligree|1 year ago
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.
kragen|1 year ago
(By the way, all organisms are made of chiral molecules; what we're talking about is reversing the chirality.)
Some of the things the immune system uses to attack things, such as superoxide, would work fine on mirror organisms. Others, such as antibodies to existing organisms, wouldn't work at all. I don't know what the balance is.
michaelmrose|1 year ago
There is no way to effect something that attacks everything it doesn't recognize because a) there is no ooeration that represents not matching and b) if there was such a cell would be a short lived bomb that would blow up your body.
You adaptive immune system learns to and antigen when a short lived immune cell is semi randomly generated that binds to it and becomes a longer lived cell.
Presumably this could still happen but this normally takes days to happen. In between your inate immune system relies on being able to recognize a lot of existing antigens that are out there and common in attackers.
Having the entire library of malicious life become magically unknown means that you are relying on only your adaptive immune system is available to contain the damage.
geysersam|1 year ago
danwills|1 year ago
But I also think it's similar in a way to 'why matter and not antimatter' or 'why ~3d space rather than no structure' (much less obvious the second one!).
But I think the real answer here is touched-on by nmstoker in a sibling comment: We're so far down the energy-gradient of the current-default-chirality on earth, that it would take exploration of an insanely-deep valley for all molecules in a cell (there are zillions even in a bacteria!) to flip the the whole thing to the alternate chirality.
It's a bit like the idea that a good chunk of matter (like even a whole amino acid) could all spontaneously-convert to antimatter at once, sure it's possible in theory but the chances are so low we might as well say it's impossible.
nmstoker|1 year ago
dhosek|1 year ago
throwawaymaths|1 year ago
cma|1 year ago
the8472|1 year ago
shaky-carrousel|1 year ago
Aerroon|1 year ago
>as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids.
There are and they already have:
>D-amino acids are toxic for life on Earth. Yet, they form constantly due to geochemical racemization and bacterial growth (the cell walls of which contain D-amino acids), raising the fundamental question of how they ultimately are recycled. This study provides evidence that bacteria use D-amino acids as a source of nitrogen by running enzymatic racemization in reverse. Consequently, when soils are inundated with racemic amino acids, resident bacteria consume D- as well as L-enantiomers, either simultaneously or sequentially depending on the level of their racemase activity. Bacteria thus protect life on Earth by keeping environments D-amino acid free.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24647559/
On the one hand, this does indicate that the "mirror bacteria" might not starve immediately, but on the other hand it shows that "non-mirror bacteria" would already be there in large numbers.
danwills|1 year ago
This is covered in the article in 2 ways though: It says that some nutrients (like glycerol) are achiral - this might mean they could still find a food source in a regular-chirality world. It also mentions that the mirror-bacterial nonstandard-chirality might 'cloak' them from regular-chirality predators (or immune-systems).
I dunno, it does seem pretty far-fetched and I am not a professional scientist so I find it hard to evaluate the risk in any worthwhile way.. but I think it still seems worth considering?
Symmetry|1 year ago
harimau777|1 year ago
krisoft|1 year ago
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
throwuxiytayq|1 year ago
tivert|1 year ago
Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.
And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.
Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.
throwaway290|1 year ago
After understanding what "mirror bacteria" is I have one word and that's "Yikes"
efitz|1 year ago
This appeals to me both as a defensive/protective measure and as a deterrent to others who might look to weaponize such organisms.
throwup238|1 year ago
They aren’t going to be mirror copies of terrestrial organisms, there’s no guarantee that mirror copies of our antibiotics will work (AFAIK it’s actually very unlikely). Protein binding sites change when mirrored because it’s not just mirror image but a change in how the proteins twist when folding, which is why most of them are sensitive to chirality. Only very simple molecules are likely to behave the same.
Stuff like bleach will still work by denaturing proteins and disrupting the bilipid layer in cell membranes but anything like tetracycline and penicilin that targets peptidoglycan enzymes or ribosomes or other complex biochemistry almost certainly won’t.
Steuard|1 year ago
serial_dev|1 year ago
"The baddies will use this as a weapon, so we need to get ahead of this, and manufacture the nastiest variants we can come up, so that we know how to DEFEND against them. It's defense, I say!"... Then eventually there is a lab leak, and there is a pandemic on your hand.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
conqueso|1 year ago
throwawaymaths|1 year ago
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.
M95D|1 year ago
- It would still have antigenic properties, just not the ones we are familiar with, because antigens are proteins or proteins bound to sugars. Both have "left" vs "right" variants.
- It can't eat any ordinary food, except simple fats. Common proteins and sugars won't fit it's enzymes. That means it can't digest sugars, proteins or any combination that contains them. It also means it can't attack and decompose our tissues, so it would have no way to enter our bodies.
- With only simple lipids as food, it would need to take all Nitrogen from the atmosphere or inorganic compounds, which means it can't really be a pathogen for humans (or any animals) even if it could somehow enter our organisms. However, it could live on the soil and possibly be a plant pathogen.
- It's "mirrored" toxins won't have any effect on us. (But compounds that are normally benign possibly could be toxic if "mirrored" - I can't say for sure if it's possible.)
Qem|1 year ago
aitchnyu|1 year ago
lawlessone|1 year ago
treyd|1 year ago
Why wouldn't it work in the other direction though? The mirror cells would be competing for the same ambidextrous resources (for my lack of a better term). Sugar is chiral isnt it? Would they be able to digest normal chiral resources?
rolph|1 year ago
so the sides of key, and reflection are switched relative to the key.
if you could somhow pluck the reflection from a mirror and try to use it, the left side is right, and right side is left.
when this happens with molecules, there is different parts of the molecules being brought together, leading to alternate interactions, thus different reaction path
cyberax|1 year ago
The only major non-chiral nutritional molecules are fatty acids.
Qem|1 year ago
dang|1 year ago
Since that thread didn't make the front page, we'll merge those comments hither. Interested readers may want to look at both articles.
dmitrygr|1 year ago
scotty79|1 year ago
nkrisc|1 year ago
aeternum|1 year ago
People forget that blue-green algae caused a global climate apocalypse, polluted the oceans and atmosphere with deadly oxygen, caused all exposed iron to rust massively changing ocean chemistry, and threw the entire globe into an ice-age that lasted 300 million years.
I wonder how we would stop something like that. It'd be like the algae bloom from hell. Plankton likely wouldn't be very successful in attempting to eat it.
mallomarmeasle|1 year ago
Borrible|1 year ago
https://www.wired.com/story/building-a-parallel-universe/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997472
00N8|1 year ago
joshuaissac|1 year ago
Once the mirror creature is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.
ceejayoz|1 year ago
"No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
PhasmaFelis|1 year ago
scotty79|1 year ago
roywiggins|1 year ago
the__alchemist|1 year ago
ltbarcly3|1 year ago
Unfortunately, even in the aftermath of a massive global disruption directly due to the creation of organisms which are supernaturally able to defeat human immune systems, it's still the wild west. There's effectively very little limitations on research that could quite literally end humanity and disrupt all life on earth, and the limitations that do exist are actively skirted, ignored with violations covered up after the fact.
aydyn|1 year ago
On the other hands mirror amino acids already exist in nature, so I find the argument that a mirror bacteria would rampage the ecosystem unchecked sensationalist. Click-bait even. More likely than not, the mirror bacteria itself would be heavily outcompeted in the wild.
notfed|1 year ago
But predatorless photosynthetic self-replicating gray goo that grows exponentially across the planet, resulting in a drastic change in CO2 and oxygen levels across the globe? Wouldn't be the first time. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
d--b|1 year ago
yawpitch|1 year ago
VyseofArcadia|1 year ago
> At long last, we have finally created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
Qem|1 year ago
> The doctor seemed to be struggling for words. 'What, dammit?' 'Something came up out, of the water, Like a parrot beak, but about a hundred times bigger. It took - Rosie - with one snap, and disappeared. We have some impressive company here; even if we could breathe outside, I certainly wouldn't recommend swimming -' 'Bridge to Captain,' said the officer on duty, 'Big disturbance in the water - camera three - I'll give you the picture.' 'That's the thing I saw!' cried the doctor. He felt a sudden chill at the inevitable, ominous thought: I hope it's not back for more. Suddenly, a vast bulk broke through the surface of the ocean and arched into the sky. For a moment, the whole monstrous shape was suspended between air and water. The familiar can be as shocking as the strange - when it is in the wrong place. Both captain and doctor exclaimed simultaneously: 'It's a shark!' There was just time to notice a few subtle differences - in addition to the monstrous parrot-beak - before the giant crashed back into the sea. There was an extra pair of fins - and there appeared to be no gills. Nor were there any eyes, but on either side of the beak there were curious protuberances that might be some other sense organs. 'Convergent evolution, of course,' said the doctor. 'Same problems, same solutions, on any planet. Look at Earth. Sharks, dolphins, ichthyosaurs - all oceanic predators must have the same basic design. That beak puzzles me, though -' 'What's it doing now?' The creature had surfaced again, but now it was moving very slowly, as if exhausted after that one gigantic leap. In fact, it seemed to be in trouble - even in agony; it was beating its tail against the sea, without attempting to move in any definite direction. Suddenly, it vomited its last meal, turned belly up, and lay wallowing lifelessly in the gentle swell. 'Oh my God,' whispered the Captain, his voice full of revulsion. 'I think I know what's happened.' 'Totally alien biochemistries,' said the doctor; even he seemed shaken by the sight. 'Rosie's claimed one victim, after all.' The Sea of Galilee was
ben_w|1 year ago
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.
nprateem|1 year ago
amyjess|1 year ago
(where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)
selimthegrim|1 year ago
skygazer|1 year ago
ceejayoz|1 year ago
fastaguy88|1 year ago
nextos|1 year ago
Most D-amino acids are known to bind MHC poorly and lead to reduced TCR recognition. I imagine this could increase the chances of evading immune surveillance.
kstrauser|1 year ago
If you 3d print a mirrored house key, the bitting may line up with the original, but the warding wouldn't fit anymore. I think that's a reasonable analogy to the way proteins match up.
pazimzadeh|1 year ago
gwbas1c|1 year ago
These fears were unfounded.
(Granted, atmospheric nuclear weapons testing has its own set of subtle consequences that are gradually becoming more well known.)
ninininino|1 year ago
pavel_lishin|1 year ago
wizzwizz4|1 year ago
ceejayoz|1 year ago
Sure, but it's good to prove that one out before pressing the button.
hnuser123456|1 year ago
Seems like the risks of this research are similar to prions.
oniony|1 year ago
aaroninsf|1 year ago
It's full of his own fetish, misogynistic sadism, and without kink shaming, I can say this makes these books—which are otherwise interesting and memorable—literally unrecommendable.
Caveat lector
XorNot|1 year ago
DocSmith|1 year ago
odyssey7|1 year ago
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.
ethbr1|1 year ago
Is it possible to mix chirality in, say, a protein?
I.e. have a portion of one chirality and another of the other?
mallomarmeasle|1 year ago
vixen99|1 year ago
throwawaymaths|1 year ago
its basically impossible (but not totally impossible) for a living creature to be able to generate any protein with mixed chiralities.
this is because a ribosome with a chamber that can support both chiralities is likely to be less efficient at protein extension. but also you need so much more trna if you want to support arbitrary d-amino acids, etc.
UniverseHacker|1 year ago
frabert|1 year ago
m3kw9|1 year ago
luma|1 year ago
roenxi|1 year ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#In_biology
jefftk|1 year ago
Individual chiral molecules can happen naturally, sure, but not entire organisms. From the report: In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images.
In the fitness landscape there is an absolutely enormous gulf between standard and mirror bacteria, large enough that no amount of incremental evolutionary pressure could flip the ~billion chiral bonds in a given bacterium simultaneously.
notfed|1 year ago
> If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring
It's unclear bacteria have ever "attempted" it. The synthesis of DNA is incredibly intricate and complex, and the set of proteins that do it are believed only to have ever evolved once. In order for a bacteria to have "attempted" this, it would have to evolve an entirely new set of proteins from scratch.
Personally I think a self-replicating photosynthetic cell with mirror DNA is as scary as self-replicating photosynthetic plastic.
kstrauser|1 year ago
jmward01|1 year ago
Qem|1 year ago
IWeldMelons|1 year ago
xolox|1 year ago
Related:
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394
gus_massa|1 year ago
Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].
The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
nytesky|1 year ago
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…
bilekas|1 year ago
trhway|1 year ago
rstuart4133|1 year ago
In the mean time, they tried using mRNA vaccines that did mimic our own mRNA, but they caused immune reaction. Substituting a different nucleoside and made the vaccine more stable. The way pseudouridine is used in mRNA vaccines isn't found in nature, ergo people who have been vaccinated are already carrying around bit bit of a form of life never seen before on the planet.
gus_massa|1 year ago
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA
> A large number of the individual nucleotides in a tRNA molecule may be chemically modified, often by methylation or deamidation. These unusual bases sometimes affect the tRNA's interaction with ribosomes and sometimes occur in the anticodon to alter base-pairing properties.
unknown|1 year ago
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