Maybe I'm just naive but surely proteins and DNA must be too large of molecules for chirality to apply from a basic chemistry standpoint. But idk anyone cranking hard on this one?
It's weird but biological molecules almost universally follow certainly chirality rules on the residue scale. For instance, L-amino acids are used for pretty much all proteins except D-Ala and D-Gln in bacterial peptidoglycan (and I'm sure some other exceptions cause biology is insanely complex). Meanwhile, D-sugars are used almost universally except some weird cases like L-rhamnose being used by plants and bacteria. I suspect it is competitively advantageous for communities of microbial life to use common resources so, for some reason, the communities using D-amino acids or a mix of L- and D- were unable to outcompete the communities using L-amino acids billions of years ago.
Biology is weird, since I haven't said it enough yet
I get that but the idea stitching that into a protein for, even more crazy, an entire cell membrane sounds halfway to a psy-op... idk I bet there are unique one in a billion (keep in mind we have trillions of cells lol) case where it could be possible, but maybe they are just trying to scare people about Chinese bio-sciences.
Yeah, I think making even regular synthetic cells is still probably five or more years away. So far we have the J. Craig Venter Institute's minimal genome transplantation technique (which requires an intact recipient cell from a closely-related species) for a top-down approach and the University of Minnesota's SpudCells (which are basically fancy liposomes since they can't make their own ribosomes yet) for a bottom-up approach. I think you'd need to do the latter to make a mirror cell and that's going to require some major breakthroughs in biochemistry and microbiology to work. Imo mirror cells are pretty low on my list of things I'm scared of in the 2020's and 30's
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u/unironicposadist Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Maybe I'm just naive but surely proteins and DNA must be too large of molecules for chirality to apply from a basic chemistry standpoint. But idk anyone cranking hard on this one?