By University of Utah-Warning of “Mirror Bacteria”: Despite its promise for medicinal improvements, the concept of “mirror life,” which involves synthetic creatures with reversed chemical architecture, has substantial hazards.
Mirror bacteria may evolve to exploit resources in ways that upset ecosystems and present unanticipated risks to the environment and public health if they are able to evade natural biological constraints, according to experts.
Mirror Life
Synthetic creatures that have their molecular structures inverted from those of normal life are referred to as “mirror life.” On the surface, it appears impossible to create such living forms, and for the time being, it is. With the technology available today, scientists would be unable to create even the most basic mirror bacteria.
The concept of mirror life, though, might not stay merely theoretical. Within the next few decades, its development might be made possible by the rapid advancements in biotechnology. If successful, mirror-image microorganisms have the potential to transform drug development and provide ground-breaking medicinal interventions. However, because of their unexpected and potentially hazardous behavior, they could also provide significant environmental problems.
The physics underpinning mirror life—and why he thinks it should stay hypothetical—is explained by Michael Kay, MD, PhD, a biochemistry professor at the University of Utah’s Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and an authority on mirror-image drugs.
The Concept of Biological Chirality
I must first discuss everyday life before I can discuss mirror life. Like your hands, every biomolecule that makes up life, including proteins and DNA, has a handedness. Theoretically, they might be available in both left-handed and right-handed varieties. Life on Earth standardized on left-handed proteins billions of years ago. The use of left-handed proteins has persisted in all subsequent life.
Therefore, the discussion of mirror-image life is akin to a “what if” experiment: What if we created life using proteins that are right-handed rather than left-handed? Something that doesn’t exist in nature but would remarkably resemble natural life. This is known as “mirror life” or “mirror-image life.” Life of this kind could only be created artificially.
Potential Applications in Medicine
We are among the top groups interested in this, and we are particularly interested in mirror-image therapy.
The body’s digestive enzymes quickly break down medicines, particularly protein or nucleic acid treatments, often in a matter of minutes. Because of this, finding accessible and affordable ways to treat chronic illnesses can be quite difficult.
However, because those digestive enzymes are unable to recognize mirror molecules, they may last for a lot longer and provide a whole new class of therapies that would enable us to treat a number of difficult-to-treat disorders.
At the moment, we assemble mirror therapies atom by atom via a chemical process. The development of mirror microorganisms that could produce these for us could pave the way for the much more effective large-scale manufacturing of mirror therapies.
Long-lasting treatments can be made using mirror biology. Crucially, chemically produced mirror molecules are incapable of self-replication and do not provide any of the dangers associated with mirror bacteria. Judah Evangelista/Kay Lab is credited.
The Risks of Synthetic Organisms
A mirror organism’s interactions with the outside world would be unstable and unexpected.
Since mirror life is unlikely to be regulated by any of the natural processes that stop germs from proliferating, there is a real risk that it may spread unchecked.
These include the immune system and antibiotics, which are not supposed to function on a mirror organism, digestive enzymes, and predators of the bacteria that aid in controlling it.
It’s possible that mirror bacteria might have trouble finding enough food to sustain their growth, but evolution humbles us.
Perhaps these bacteria could eventually develop the ability to consume our food and turn it into mirror food if they can grow at all, which there is evidence suggests they would be able to do in our natural environment, at least to some degree. As far as we can determine, all of these other regulatory systems would be ineffective against these mirror bacteria if that occurred since it would put a stop to their growth.
However, this decision is fraught with uncertainties. The information available to us at this time is insufficient to determine the risk with certainty.
Technological Horizons and Future Possibilities
The fact that individuals are aware that there isn’t an immediate danger is crucial. An entire bacterial cell is far more sophisticated than anything we have ever constructed. It’s quite challenging, and new technologies are still required to accomplish that effectively enough.
However, new technologies, chemical synthesis, and minimal cell development are all developing quickly at this exciting time in synthetic biology, so we felt that now was a good time to have this conversation because those foundational technologies are beginning to take shape.
The greatest estimate we have, in my opinion, is that, should we decide to prioritize this, something similar would likely be feasible in one to three decades. It would require enormous resources and the collaboration of a vast multinational team of scientists who are experts in many facets of cell production.
Without a doubt, this won’t happen right away. However, it’s not so far off that we believe we can simply pray it won’t occur for some time.
Mitigating Risks and Planning Ahead
With a wide range of stakeholders, we hope that this perspective will serve as the catalyst for in-depth conversations on the subject. In the upcoming year, we intend to begin holding worldwide conferences to talk about the risks and collaborate with other organizations to create a legislative framework that would enable us to avoid them.
There would be no impact on anyone’s ongoing research. We believe there is a chance to establish appropriate research lines, lines that regulatory bodies should carefully consider, and lines we shouldn’t cross before anyone’s livelihood is on the line.
It’s critical to distinguish between mirror life and the already-occurring benign applications of mirror technology. Our lab is now working on developing mirror medicines. These are chemically produced, therefore they don’t have the potential to pose any of the risks associated with creating self-replicating mirror germs.
It will be extremely difficult to try to put the genie back in the bottle once a mirror cell has been created. That’s one of the main reasons we’re considering regulation and prevention much in advance of any possible real risk.
Reference: “Confronting risks of mirror life” by Katarzyna P. Adamala, Deepa Agashe, Yasmine Belkaid, Daniela Matias de C. Bittencourt, Yizhi Cai, Matthew W. Chang, Irene A. Chen, George M. Church, Vaughn S. Cooper, Mark M. Davis, Neal K. Devaraj, Drew Endy, Kevin M. Esvelt, John I. Glass, Timothy W. Hand, Thomas V. Inglesby, Farren J. Isaacs, Wilmot G. James, Jonathan D. G. Jones, Michael S. Kay, Richard E. Lenski, Chenli Liu, Ruslan Medzhitov, Matthew L. Nicotra, Sebastian B. Oehm, Jaspreet Pannu, David A. Relman, Petra Schwille, James A. Smith, Hiroaki Suga, Jack W. Szostak, Nicholas J. Talbot, James M. Tiedje, J. Craig Venter, Gregory Winter, Weiwen Zhang, Xinguang Zhu and Maria T. Zuber, 12 December 2024, Science.
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