DTN 158: Will synthetic mirror life kill us all?

"A reaction that might have taken 30 steps before to reach a starting point for drug discovery can now potentially be done in four steps. That means compounds that nobody would have bothered screening because of low yield and high cost are suddenly tractable."

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No one's sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all

“For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-­edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be, the lab-created microbes would be structured and organized like ordinary bacteria, with one important exception: Key biological molecules like proteins, sugars, and lipids would be the mirror images of those found in nature. DNA, RNA, and many other components of living cells are chiral, which means they have a built-in rotational structure. Their mirrors would twist in the opposite direction. 

The group saw enormous potential for medicine, too. Mirror microbes might be engineered as biological factories, producing mirror molecules that could form the basis for new kinds of drugs. In theory, such therapeutics could perform the same functions as their natural counterparts, but without triggering unwelcome immune responses. 

By five years later, in 2024, many researchers involved in that NSF meeting had reversed course. They’d become convinced that in the worst of all possible futures, mirror organisms could trigger a catastrophic event threatening every form of life on Earth; they’d proliferate without predators and evade the immune defenses of people, plants, and animals.” (via MIT Tech Review)

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