Leading Scientists Urge Ban On Developing 'Mirror-Image' Bacteria

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: It would be a nightmare lab leak: Synthetic bacteria escape the petri dish and unleash a global plague that life on Earth is incapable of defending itself against. That's the concern raised by a group of eminent researchers in a Policy Forum published online today in Science. The commentary's 38 authors, from a broad range of disciplines, argue that governments worldwide should prohibit research and funding aimed at creating so-called mirror-image bacteria whose chemical makeup differs in a fundamental way from that of naturally existing organisms.

All of life's primary biomolecules can exist in two mirror-image forms, like a left and right hand. But only one form is found in nature. Proteins are left-handed, for example, and DNA and RNA are right-handed. Synthetic biologists have previously synthesized mirror-image proteins and genetic molecules. And mirror-image amino acids and peptides -- the building blocks of proteins -- have been incorporated into several approved drugs. Because natural enzymes struggle to break down mirror-image biomolecules, these components help the drugs survive longer in the body.

The concern, he and others say, is that taking this line of work many steps further could result in fully mirror-image bacteria that could reproduce. Such organisms would likely be able to infect and potentially harm a wide range of microbes, plants, and animals while resisting the molecules that enable predators to kill and digest existing microbes. 'They are essentially unassailable to those enzymes,' says John Glass, a co-author and synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Animals' immune systems would also struggle to cope with mirror bacteria. They 'would be invisible to the immune system until it was too late,' says Timothy Hand, a co-author and immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh. The Policy Forum authors acknowledge it will be at least a decade before synthetic biologists will be capable of creating these life forms. Nevertheless, they recommend halting all research aimed at that goal and urge funding agencies not to support it. 'It's hard to overstate how severe these risks could be,' says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale University and one of the authors. 'If mirror bacteria were to spread through infected animals and plants, much of the planet's many environments could be contaminated.... Any exposure to contaminated dust or soil could be fatal.'

Jack Szostak, a co-author and a 2019 Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago, adds: 'The result could be catastrophic irreversible damage, perhaps far worse than any challenge we've previously encountered.'

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