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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Except in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral.

On the other hand, the recommendations are all commonsense, and don't only apply to mirror life. For instance...

>>> In a first line of effort, the United States should engage scientific superpowers, especially China, to build the foundation for collective restraint. Policymakers and the scientific community should prioritize transparent scientific collaboration, shared risk assessments, and early norm-setting.

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This is something which has been thought about by those in the field, and the conclusion is that it’s probably possible to engineer an organism with an ample food supply,

e.g in this report

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158

“ Achiral nutrients are available in quantities sufficient for growth of common bacteria in a wide range of natural environments, including within potential hosts (1). Further genetic engineering could provide mirror bacteria with pathways needed to consume abundant chiral nutrients such as d-glucose. Growth of mirror bacteria outside of the laboratory is therefore plausible. However, their interactions with other lifeforms would differ profoundly because of their reversed chirality.”

That was the belief - but it was found it was possible to grow E.coli on non-chiral molecules that are commonly available. The worry then is that the immune system will ignore the wrong-chirality infection.

See p.14 of https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/cv716pj4036/Technical%20Rep...

Incorrect. There are symmetric achiral molecules. Which can be consumed as food for both normal, and mirror life, thus creating competition for resources.

> Except in the world of "anything is possible," mirror life would have no food. All biomolecules are chiral.

Many essential biomolecules, nutrients, and amino acides are achiral (e.g. carbon dioxide, water, ammonium, phosphate, sulfate, glycine, and more). Mirror organisms could easily - at least in the realm of plausibility - function as autotrophs to convert sunlight, CO2, etc. into organic sugars, or extract energy from inorganic materials like hydrogen or iron paired with CO2.

Possible path for organic zero calorie sugars!

L-Glucose already exists, but the problem is that the amount in, e.g. one soda would make your intestines decide to entirely empty themselves. It's been trialed as a colon-cleansing agent for colonoscopy in much smaller doses than say a can of Coke would need, so it's not very useful in a consumer product.

Posted elsewhere in the comments:

https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world

1. Mirror life may be able to evolve catalysts that alter the chirality of non-mirror organic molecules.

2. Mirror chloroplasts may be able to use achiral small molecules to form mirror biological macromolecules, like normal chloroplasts.

> All biomolecules are chiral.

The confidence with which people say utterly asinine things...

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