In our high school chemistry classes we all learn about chirality, the property of organic molecules in which two chemically identical molecules can have different structures that are mirror images of each other. This can lead to their exhibiting different properties, and one aspect of chirality is causing significant concerns in the field of synthetic biology. The prospect of so-called mirror organisms is leading to calls from a group of prominent scientists for research in the field to be curtailed due to the risks they would present.
Chirality is baked into all life; our DNA is formed of right-handed molecules while our proteins are left handed. The “mirror” organisms would reverse either or both of these, and could in theory be used to improve biochemical production processes. The concern is that these organisms would evade both the immune systems of all natural life forms, and any human defences such as antibiotics, thus posing an existential risk to life. It’s estimated that the capacity to produce such a life form lies more than a decade away, and the scientists wish to forestall that by starting the conversation early. They are calling for a halt to research likely to result in these organisms, and a commitment from funding bodies not to support such research.
Warnings of the dangers from scientific advances are as old as science itself, and it’s safe to say that many such prophecies have come from dubious sources and proved not to have a basis in fact. But this one, given the body of opinion behind it, is perhaps one that should be heeded.
Header: Original: Unknown Vector: — πϵρήλιο, Public domain.
Well, another thing could kill us…germ warfare, and yet here we are. Someone is eventually going to try. We just don’t take ‘no’ for answer to anything.
We knew radiation can kill us and a teen in Michigan tried to create a nuclear reactor in the backyard. Someone will always try something that is likely very dangerous or very risky
Plenty of people have actually created them! And none have died from it that I know of.
Could be applied to anything, especially via an appeal to the most extreme edge cases (like the nuclear schoolboy above). Yet risk mitigation is still widely used to good effect. One might argue it’s the most common human endeavor.
Like I don’t remember any cases of germ warfare for several decades. Well we did have that big one a few years ago but aside from that…
When was the last germ warfare? I don’t remember any.
You might want to ask China about the things Unit 731 did on the mainland (although Japan will heavily dispute). Then look at germ warfare accidents — Soviet Union had a doozy with Anthrax. And then all that smallpox that was supposed to be in P4 containment went missing along with who knows what else when the Wall came down.
I see. Though, even if you consider these as germ warfare, none of these are “a few years ago”.
I believe TG is referencing the (unfounded / disproven) conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon.
It’s really unbecoming of you to conflate unproven with disproven; but certainly not unfounded.
Johnny here is clearly a koolaid drinker…. He certainly believes everything his governments tell him without question. His naivety would be funny if the result wasn’t so devastating. Don’t be like Johnny…
Nuf said.
That’s idea for utopic novel, where crazy scientist creates breed of r-people who then run away and disperse through world only to realize they need to find their extremely rare right-handed partner, because they cannot have kids with left-handed majority.
Well, they would die of malnutrition first.
I mean… Not if they steal the matter mirroring device schematics while running away. Also they can become cannibals or posses seeds of r-plants stolen from the original lab. they can also isolate r-bacteria from their gut and then grow huge collonies of kombucha-like gloop or marmite using it. Also some of the nutritients needed by humans are not chiral.
Lead by Samuel D Jackson…
I think you mean Samuel R. Jackson.
Not Samuel L. Jackson?
Actually I think it’s Samuel MF’ing Jackson…..
Later there is a huge epidemic that only affects l-people, so the r-people turn out to be very crucial for survival of human race. Also the plague equalizes number of L and R people in the world, bringing back the ballance. Yet there is new group of militant conservative l-chiralists, who spread fear and hate towards r-people.
Yeah gotta take it back to the ubiquitous plotline of the 20th-21st centuries somehow, get some holocaust references in there and you’re all set
Another point is that not all molecules are chiral. For example fat molecules are not chiral. To live, this “mirror” bacterium would need to be able to metabolize fats. Incidentally our brains are 60% fat. So, a brain eating, immunity evading, antibiotics resistant organism… sounds great, right?
Yet another point is that many chiral molecules are extremely toxic. One example is Thalidomide for humans. One way it’s is a pain killer, the other way it causes babies without arms.
If a “mirrored” organism was trying to live within our biology, it would almost certainly get poisoned to death by some random molecule that is completely harmless to us. This is the reason why life defaults to one and not both options at the same time. They’re just not compatible.
Quick! We should start researching anti-clockwise rifling on guns so we can at least shoot these mirror-creatures! Quick! Fund me!
Clockwise rifling will still work fine for those south of equator!
Yes, the solution is easy… We just use antipodean antibiotics. They can simply flush it down their toilets that spin the wrong way and then trade it for ours, everyone wins
If they are “mirrored” put a mirror in front of your gun to mirror the bullet.
Anyone else misread that as “chivalry”?
I misread it as “Charity.”
Sigmund Freud is monitoring this thread
Freud says: Ya very interesting, you just need to tell me about ur mudar and ur vater …
Hurr huurrr a hurrr… you said “Vater”
Just like curtailing development of the Torment Nexus.
Or gain of function research
No. It’s not like that at all.
Yeah, my tinfoil hat is leaking official opinions from the state department:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-department-documents-credibly-suggest-covid-19-lab-leak-wenstrup-pushes-for-declassification/
Have you not been keeping up to date or something
Google down again?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
Our immune systems will attack an inanimate object that doesn’t belong inside of us but supposedly it would not attack a reverse-chirality microbe?
Sounds like yet-another ‘resurch is skary’ story.
Remember, life is just about everywhere we look on and in the Earth. So… the grey goo scenario? It already happened and we ARE the grey goo.
The immune system does a lot of specialization beyond “attack anything foreign”. Imagine a mirror version of Measles that makes the current vaccine useless. Or a mirror version of salmonella that is unaffected by antibiotics. These mirror diseases would probably have trouble thriving in our bodies in ways the regular microbes don’t but it’s not crazy to be worried.
Or worse. People that themselves are backward and think measles doesn’t exist anyway and that vaccination is a waste of time.
Yeah and maybe they’ll even ban manufacturing new coronaviruses while they’re at it, that might be nice
I think your tinfoil hat is leaking. You should probably have it checked.
Sigh …. apparently HaD readers aren’t as intelligent as we thought after all.
@Andrew
@AZdave
I thought it was pretty well known that covid-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan, though? Is there some controversy here that I’m missing? Is this a red-team blue-team kind of thing?
Someone needs to get the copper clad tin foil hat upgrade 2.0
Replying to Anonymous (if that’s your real name). No, it is not pretty well known that covid-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan. It is pretty well known that there is no conclusive proof of its origin.
The mirror version of a virus would not work, because viruses rely on the host cells replicating their DNA. If the DNA of the host is turning the wrong way, the virus cannot integrate and will simply fail to reproduce.
So, no reverse Measles.
This is actually a completely unprecedented risk. If one were to create a “mirrored” pathogenic bacteria, which is conceivable in the relatively near future, then it would be virtually unstoppable. Bacteria are capable of producing all the amino acids they need to reproduce, so it would be completely capable of replication in the wild.
Your body’s immune system would not be able to fight it at all. None of our antibiotics would work for it. Phages, which can infect and kill bacteria would be useless against mirrored bacteria.
A mirrored virus wouldn’t be a threat, but a mirrored bacteria could end all multi-cellular life on Earth.
I see lots of claims with no substance here. I’m ignorant, but logically, I don’t follow. Why can’t our immune system self destruct on such a bacteria and kill it? We have cells that do just that as the defense mechanism. Do the bacteria suddenly become adamantium? What’s the thing making these bacteria immune to disinfectants and kamikaze t cells?
If the bacteria can already produce everything, why does it need to be inside our bodies? What is it that they need?
Viruses use cell machinery to make more viruses. Our tRNAs are loaded with the wrong chirality amino acids. Many viruses make polyproteins that need to be transported or processed in the cell. If that virus depends on our cellular machinery to do this, our proteases can’t cut, our receptors won’t bind at least some of the signals. A reverse mirror measles would immediately crash in our cells without making a single copy of itself.
Regarding the salmonella: Maybe you could make a mirror salmonella (I actually doubt it). If you were a bad guy looking to make people sick, it would be decades less work to make normal chirality salmonella that is multidrug resistant.
Teams of people are working on making the enzyme to make the reverse RNA needed to make a ribosome (you need a reverse polymerase enzyme to do this. Then you need all the reverse proteins in the ribosome. And remember those tRNAs above? You guessed it, you need them the other way around. Why is that a problem, I just said you have a reverse RNA polymerase? Because tRNAs are full of weird modifications (pseudouridine etc etc)
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/ecosalplus.esp-0007-2013
Guess what? You need mirror enzymes to modify those mirror tRNAs.
So to simplify: It’s elephants all the way down
A cell biologist
Viluses won’t live AT ALL. As they eat DNA which is chiral.
The “immune system attack” is not a kinetic attack, but a protein binding to another, and processing it.
If the target is the wrong way, or have the wrong turns, immune system cannot bind to it, inactivate it or damage it. It’s basically impervious to the immune system. But the oxygen, water, and a lot of molecules on our bodies (and on plants, and everything) don’t have chirality, so this “wrontg chiralled bacterium” can use it, reproduce, and we cannot do anything about it.
Someone says “radiation can kill us too,” and while correct, radiation can be contained: isolate the are, or drop a giant concrete casket on top of it. A “wrong-side” bacterium will spread, nothing can stop it, and there’s no giant concrete casket that can save us.
Eh, it’ll be more complex than that. One function of the immune system is to flag anything which isn’t “my human”, so it doesn’t matter if the molecule is left or right-handed: it still isn’t you, so your immune system will flag it for attack, and some of the mechanisms of those attacks won’t care about chirality either. Case in point: most bacteria have peptidoglycan cell walls which include both D- and L-Alanine, and there are multiple ways to detect and deal with microbes based on the cell wall structure. Chirality isn’t new, there are enzymes around (including in humans) whose job is to flip a compound from one form to the other. The only novelty here is the majority replacement of these compounds with the mirror form.
Some things will be affected. Alternative chirality will probably require very different protein structures, so you’ll need new monoclonal antibodies and some types of vaccines, and probably a lot of antibiotics won’t recognise their proteins/structures/whatever. That doesn’t mean you can’t create these for mirror organisms, you’d just need new ones.
It could be medically bad, but there’s no reason to think they’ll be totally invisible to the immune system.
I agree. The immune system has a “papers please” sort of presentation to other cells and thus if the papers aren’t recognized then they get removed. In addition, these mirrored organisms may be useless themselves (in terms of being a pathogen) because their proteins/toxins would not longer bind to ours and have the detrimental effect that their non-mirrored versions would have.
This overall discussion reminds me of an encounter I had with a patient asking me if the hospital had any Xyzal (Levocetirizine) they could take. I jokingly told them no but they did have Zyrtec (cetirizine), and if they took it using their left hand then it would probably be similar to Xyzal.
Or, our proteins would have a toxic effect on them just as much as they have on us. I’m thinking along the lines of CJD prion disease: why does life default to these proteins and not their counterparts, or having a mixture of the two? Probably because many kinds of proteins are mutually exclusive and wrong things happen when they meet. The “mirror” pathogen would most likely die right away by exposure to our proteins and other molecules, or kill the host so quickly that it could not spread any further.
Is it correct to say that no molecules of opposing chirality can chemically bind to one another? Because otherwise I’d assume that the immune system would simply start making new antibodies that correspond to the new pathogens, regardless of which way their proteins face.
It isn’t a goal-oriented process; biology would simply throw stuff at the wall until something sticks to a surface protein. And any organism that fails to do it would die and be replaced by one that could.
Granted, it would suck to be in the former category for possibly a long time (in human terms). I’m on team don’t-make-the-mirror-universe-germs, but I still have the question of chemical bonding. Chemistry isn’t my thing
“Is it correct to say that no molecules of opposing chirality can chemically bind to one another?”
No, not at all. Chirality is a higher-order phenomenon than what we normally think of as “chemistry” (meaning atoms, orbitals, functional groups and such). It’s like, the “S” and “Z” blocks in Tetris aren’t interchangeable, but fundamentally they still fit together like any other blocks.
Like others, I find it implausible that mirror life would have any special advantage against our immune systems. We know L- and D-enantiomers can smell different, but we can still smell both; and smell is closely related to how antibodies work. Also, organisms would have evolved to exploit any chirality advantage if it existed.
The ecological danger might be more serious. Organisms higher up the food chain depend on their prey to synthesize chiral amino acids, sugars and lipids. If you have mirror algae that are useless and/or poisonous to fish, they might outcompete regular algae and cause a chain reaction yada yada – I don’t know any of the details, (and no one knows all the details), but there’s enough doubt to merit serious caution.
The fact that biology is uniformly racemic suggests that mirror life cannot survive in the wild (because molecules of mixed chirality did once exist, and evolution spent energy stamping that out). And I don’t think anyone is betting on the apocalyptic scenario. But even tiny risks have to be taken seriously if the consequences are world-ending.
I hadn’t even thought of that, it’s a great point. So they’d be “junk amino acids”, not actually nutritionally valuable unless the organism actually breaks the amino acids down to smaller compounds before building them up again. You could eat and eat and still be malnourished.
Reading the top of the article, the authors were initially skeptical of any harm, did a bit of analysis, and feel that the risks are worth talking about. They’re really saying that this needs talked about now, while it is theoretical, so any possible issues are hopefully identified before it happens. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
yeah i don’t know if you’re right or not but a part of me hopes the experiment is conducted just so we can find out :)
It seems that reverse germs would have hard time finding nutrients in our bodies.
You didn’t read the article, did you?
Please to not create photosynthesising reverse-chirality life. It would be like a self-replicating oil spill.
The humongous vast majority of microbial life and viruses that we come into contact every day are benign at worst or symbiotic at best. The disease causing ones are super rare by comparison.
I guess in some dystopian future a huge bioreactor full of synthetic organisms next to a water supply gets damaged and we all die but but that seems pretty far off.
In any case you could still put in a regular handed cell protein that responds to an antimicrobial of your choice, or just synthesize up the opposite hand version of said antibiotic anyway.
Plus all the nonspecific germ killing stuff (heat, UV, bleach, etc) would still work anyway as well.
I’m not panicking yet.
The disease ones are rare now. Benign parasitism is almost always an ancient truce with something that used to be a debilitating disease. Producing a bunch of new organisms that don’t have this truce might be pretty nasty, at least for a while. Eventually life would adapt, which is to say everything that couldn’t adapt would die off.
And it’s too much of an assumption imo that simply making the reverse-chirality antibiotic would work reliably.
As a biochemist and molecular biologist, I assure you the process of making and testing antimicrobials is established art. There would (hopefully!) be no “hope it works” about it.
Yes, but how are you on spontaneous unrequested mutations?
Like. Super strong. Only spent my PhD introducing targeted mutagenesis into viral proteins to study enzyme effects. But yeah, one doesnt even need to go that far. spontaneous mutagenesis is well within the range of understanding of a high school biology student.
.
It’s unclear to me if you are trying to actually be helpful so I will give you then benefit of the doubt. But bringing up super simple “yeah but!” arguments as if the bleeding edge researchers working on this haven’t even considered them isn’t going to get you far. Cheers.
It’s far more likely that the introduced lifeform, unlike anything else around, would be the one having difficulty adapting. The race condition situation for an opposite bacteria to take everything over is a possibility, sure, but with the way isomers work, the odd duck out, the backwards bacteria, will have orders of magnitude more potentially lethal interactions with… well… All other life working opposite it.
I’m curious how many of these opposing voices are from industry and how many are from academia. L-Glucose tastes exactly like glucose, but its chirality makes it indigestible, making it the perfect zero calorie sweetener.
Right now it’s extremely expensive to manufacture, but if you could create a left-handed microbe to make it at scale, the public health benefits would be pretty incredible.
Some industries have a financial incentive to prevent a product like L-Glucose from coming to market.
“Indigestible” sweeteners based on modifying the sugars themselves have a habit of being consumed by bacteria that can break them down. Eventually you get a version of your regular gut bacteria that starts eating L-Glucose and replicating at a prodigious rate, causing the same effect as a lactose intolerant person drinking raw milk.
Also see the “Olestra” fat substitute. Non digestible oil ended up absorbing fat-soluble vitamins from the food and causing diarrhea.
It might also not be good for you, more testing needed.
OK, on the one hand it’s bad, but on the other hand…
Ahaha! +1
…there are five fingers!
Making a benign alternate chirality organism will probably happen because science. But if “they” intentionally make an alternate chirality pathogenic organism I’m pretty sure that would violate all sorts of international law about bioterrorism and biological warfare and stuff. Not saying government agencies always care about that stuff but the international community would certainly have something to say about that.
But, by that time, the word that the international community says, might be “gag”, “choke”, “wheeze”, “arrrrgh”…
Elon Musk: “Today I’m launching ChiralX”
No, otherwise prove that there is perfect symmetry in chemistry and that Earth life is not actually already optimal. The chirality choice is not arbitrary. Quantum physics and chemistry suggest that there is no perfect symmetry in biochemical reactions. This can be due to quantum effects, such as those from the weak nuclear force, which may slightly favor one enantiomer over another.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11536669/
^ I vaguely remember this being a thing, and that light polarisation can affect chirality in organic molecules in space, which could effect initial conditions on planets for abiogenesis if molecules from out of the atmosphere play much of a part.
Pretty outlandish theory given that chemical compounds like H2S is a lifesource for extremophile organisms.
This sounds an awful lot like Y2K to me. Also we’re not really a biology focussed group. Smart is smart, but specialists actually know the subject, and the few specialists who commented aren’t all that worried, so I’m not worried until there’s evidence. People are too bad at predicting anything ever. Not much I’ve read by the side demanding caution stands up to logic. Maybe it’s a quantum thing?
My Ph.D. is in analytical chemistry, so I do not consider myself qualified to disagree with a group of scientists who are qualified, knowledgeable, and prominent in the biological sciences. Moreover, they were able to publish this article, not in one of those pisspots that will publish anything for money, but in one of the most respected, peer-reviewed science journals in the world.
So I am doing what scientists are supposed to do: accept that these scientists know what they’re talking about. Not “blind acceptance” but with scientific skepticism that is appropriate to the source. Skepticism that, in this case, is pretty slim—especially considering the potential consequences if these scientists are correct.