Only thing being changed is nucleic acid chirality, which is rather clever, but not presently useful for anything other than info storage bc there's no easy way to scale it up to the level of an organism, which would also need to have some way to synthesize L-ribose + deoxyribosehttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1420966001890394112 …
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Which in turn would probably need a source of L-glucose to produce via the pentose phosphate pathway, which means designing enzymes for each step of the way.pic.twitter.com/h1ATIcDtzd
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But then you need a source of L-glucose that isn't exorbitantly expensive to make, so you'd need further biomachinery for that. "For want of a nail" and so on.
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Seldon Retweeted eigenrobot
Proteins are presumably still levo (normal) but perhaps some or all of the carbohydrates would be mirror chirality - those wouldn't be digestible ofc.https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1420967452507181059 …
Seldon added,
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So yeah, they may have a significant advantage - they'd be immune to all viruses, and heterotrophs might not be able to use their saccharides. Could even be difficult to tell apart.
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Seldon Retweeted eigenrobot
But... if the proteins are still levo then they wouldn't be 100% immune from predation. I'd bet something would evolve to eat it, even make use of the mirror sugarshttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1420989331242557448 …
Seldon added,
eigenrobot @eigenrobotgonna pat myself on the back for apparently independently deriving a standard view of the ecological dangers of mirror life so yes if mirror cyanobacteria escaped from a lab we would probably all die fortunately biology labs are proven extremely secure https://twitter.com/prawncis/status/1420982623048925187?s=19 …Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
I wouldn't worry about it too much - if you have the resources to build something like that, a countermeasure (designing + introducing phages and digestive enzymes) could easily be implemented
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yeah that was where I ended up although hmm wonder whether the polymerase was made with L-amino acids or D- I guess that's an important consideration here?
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Replying to @eigenrobot
I figure it has to be levo. A 90 kDa enzyme is way too big to create with D-amino acids from scratch. Also, mirroring the deoxyribose backbone is what changes DNA chirality.
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