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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 currentl
by throwawaymaths 2y ago
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.
- ninininino 2y agoI don't think anyone is worried about mirror proteins by themselves, they are worried about someone assembling a self-replicating/self-propagating mirror life, no? In which case, the fear is that you can't just run around ozone-ing every little colony of chiral-mirror version of cyanobacteria under every rock in remote Siberia or wherever.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago1. > Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case? 2. by way of direct response to your question. mirror nutrients (like scavenged AAs, even for autotrophs) are liable to be very scarce so they'll have one hell of a disadvantage makimg it on this world.
- roywiggins 2y agoNot if you engineer your mirror bacterium to eat normal nutrients to get them started. Or they scavenge enough non-chiral molecules to eat that they get the opportunity to evolve the capability on their own.
- throwawaymaths 2y agobuilding from non chiral molecules is prototrophy, not scavenging. anyways, existing lifeform already scavenge mirror molecules (especially d-ala since thats used in cell walls) so they are already competing in a quite saturated environment with highly adapted organisms.
- notfed 2y agoI'm really curious to know the details here. What is the minimal set of dependencies for the simplest autotroph? Clearly there was an original self-replicating cell and it was successful, so assuming we constructed the necessary proteins, why do you think it would be difficult the second time?
- jtwaleson 2y agoThis is the big question about abiogenesis. If it was easy then life in the universe could be very common. If it is exceedingly difficult, we might be alone. What is the smallest set of molecules needed to self-replicate, and how common are the ingredients (& nutrients)? I believe all of this is completely unknown, but I havent looked into the research for years now.
- throwawaymaths 2y agosyn 2.0? 3.0? is poking at the minimum set of genes for life, but that organism needs a lot of things to survive. i think it grows on horse serum
- notfed 2y agoI think for the purpose of this topic, we only care about the nutrition (to use your word) question. We can assume humans can intelligently bootstrap past the other abiogenesis problems. And surely this shouldn't be a difficult question to answer, right? Put an autotroph (the simplest that we know of) in a test tube and give it a ever-stricter diet and observe how far you can go without it dying off.