>design mirror proteins by altering amino acid sequences to make enantiomers>this can be used to engineer mirror bacteria that have the opposite chirality of all other bacteria on earth>you now have a bacteria potentially immune to all traditional antibiotics that can disrupt food websSynthetic biology is only going to get easier in the future. What's to stop some terrorist group or death cult from using this to fuck things up?
your mirrored biology would find everything in the environment with opposing chirality inedible.it would be really hard to get a foothold
Well the other important factor to consider would be whether or not your organism is autotrophic, chemotropic, or heterotrophic. Basically if your living thing can make it’s own energy from EM spectra like the sun/radiation or from reduction of achiral species (chemicals like elemental sulfur don’t have stereochemistry and some bacteria use it to make energy) it could go about it’s metabolism without reliance on the rest of life, but if your organism needs to consume chiral species from other life that mirrors it, it may have a problem. The one exception to that would be if your organism’s metabolism relies on achiral species from other living things, think ethanol to acetic acid metabolism. Imo the biggest threat would be if it was photosynthetic (autotroph) because sunlight is virtually everywhere and it could easily fill an ecological niche and would compete with our food web.Don’t freak out too bad though, the hurdles of making synthetic life with naturally occurring stereochemistry, making mirrors of all these chemical species manually, and then building mirror life are so complicated, expensive, and far away that if someone wanted to harm our ecology, humans, or life on earth there are much more cost effective and more achievable ways to do that :/
>>16536490Just give them left and right feet
Theres likely some limiting factor that prevents such life forms from being successful otherwise theyd already be around.
>>16536781ever wonder why all screws are right-handed, save for the specific applications where you absolutely need a left-handed screw like a bicycle crank?turns out earth's biota doesn't have an absolutely necessary need for one chirality or the other, so the one that got a foothold first came to dominate
>>16536792Chirality is tied to magnetic poles, so you are wrong.
>>16536482Interestingly, the Universe and much of Biology seems to be "Left-handed" and loves levo-rotarty amino acids, et. al., so making a mirror image wouldn't "work" very well. Sort of like putting a left foot in a right shoe. Some venoms actually operate this way by altering the chirality of saliva. An interesting "happy accident" in Nature that conferred an advantage, but usually just does nothing.
>>16536482>What's to stop some terrorist groupyou'd have to synthesize mirror image amino acids without enzymes, and then synthesize and fold mirror image enzymes without chaperones, and then you'd have to make protein complexes without enzymes and chaperones, and enzymes without relevant enzymes that are used in their biosynthesis pathway, and then you'd have to account for nonprotein chiral molecules, like metabolites, make a proper growth medium that couldn't be obtained from grinding meat into a paste or extracting sugars because you need the mirror image sugars, aminoacids and vitamins. All that while trying to prevent your fresh proteins from degrading, because not all off them are stable, and most o them aren't yet folded properly since you lack the means to fold them. And not only to assemble all the pieces together. I wonder, does one first assemble the mitochondrial prepeptide porting machinery and get ready to jumpstart oxidative phosphorylation or do you assemble the mirror image genome into viable topological domains in your DIY nucleus with mirror image pore complexes.So I guess 100 trillion hours of laboratory work by a team of 100 thousand chemists is good enough safety measure
>>16536923elementary particle chirality plays no role in biologymolecular chirality does
>>16536490>it would be really hard to get a footholdshould make a black mirror episode where some billionaires corner all the agricultural land and start producing S-wheat and make the population take their proprietary S-mrna platform
>>16536482>bacteria eats D-glucose>diesWow. Brilliant. Now what's the next step in your master plan?
>>16536792So the presence of an existing chirality is a limiting factor to a new chirality. Got it.
