#mirror_life — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mirror_life, aggregated by home.social.
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#Research_Funding #Mirror_Life #Academia
"The policy also bars funding for studies in the nascent field of “mirror life”—engineered microorganisms with reversed molecular building blocks that could theoretically threaten all life on Earth. No governments have so far enacted bans on such research and the issue has divided scientists, with some calling such prohibitions premature."
New U.S. rules on risky #pathogen research draw mixed reviews:
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-u-s-rules-risky-pathogen-research-draw-mixed-reviews -
Regarding your 2nd question, although initially a mirror microbe may not be able to bind specifically to host receptors and such, they can passively translocate across the host's various barriers and then establish uncontrolled replication because the host's immune mechanisms are mostly chiral-specific.
Here's a link for more reading: https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
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I'll answer briefly but I'm providing a link to a paper that gives far more details (mirror life is not my specific field of expertise).
Regarding your 1st question, mirror microbes would at the very least consume achiral nutrients (e.g. glycerol) much like their naturally occurring chiral counterparts. But the mirror microbe could also be engineered to consumer chiral nutrients (e.g. D-glucose) as well.
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Fascinating.
"A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn": https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/mirror-life-microbes-research.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g04.-gel.tXVAGQfASRFs
"There wouldn’t be many organic molecules inside a human body for a mirror cell to feed on. But Dr. Cooper and his colleagues suspect that it might find enough to grow slowly. And if the immune system did not detect the growing infection, it could spread without limit."