It seems to me that it’s going to be easier to build a bacteria with changed coding for amino acid then to get a whole mirror organism bacteria to work.
Having a 4-base pairs per amino acid coding where a single mutation does not result in a different amino acid being expressed and is a stop codon is useful for having a stable organism that doesn’t mutate and thus people might build it.
You get the same problem of the new bacteria being immune against existing phages but on the plus-side it’s not harder for the immune system to deal with it.
Instead of focusing research dollars on antibiotics, I would expect them to be more effectively spend on phage development to be able to create phages that target potentially problematic bacteria.
I don’t understand. You shouldn’t get any changes from changing encoding if it produces the same proteins—the difference for mirror life is that it would also mirror proteins, etc.
Viruses (including phages) depend on the protein production of the host cell. If the host cell codes proteins differently, the proteins that the virus “wants” to produce don’t get produced.
While we still don’t know a lot about phages, I think it’s likely that phages are a key part of why we have the biodiversity of bacteria in the ocean and other environments that we have. The more of a given bacteria exist, the easier it is for phages to keep the populations of that bacteria down.
If someone would take a bacteria from the ocean where the population is currently limited by phages, modifying it to change its coding and thus not express the phages that currently target it might massively increase the population of that bacteria.
It seems to me that it’s going to be easier to build a bacteria with changed coding for amino acid then to get a whole mirror organism bacteria to work.
Having a 4-base pairs per amino acid coding where a single mutation does not result in a different amino acid being expressed and is a stop codon is useful for having a stable organism that doesn’t mutate and thus people might build it.
You get the same problem of the new bacteria being immune against existing phages but on the plus-side it’s not harder for the immune system to deal with it.
Instead of focusing research dollars on antibiotics, I would expect them to be more effectively spend on phage development to be able to create phages that target potentially problematic bacteria.
I don’t understand. You shouldn’t get any changes from changing encoding if it produces the same proteins—the difference for mirror life is that it would also mirror proteins, etc.
Viruses (including phages) depend on the protein production of the host cell. If the host cell codes proteins differently, the proteins that the virus “wants” to produce don’t get produced.
While we still don’t know a lot about phages, I think it’s likely that phages are a key part of why we have the biodiversity of bacteria in the ocean and other environments that we have. The more of a given bacteria exist, the easier it is for phages to keep the populations of that bacteria down.
If someone would take a bacteria from the ocean where the population is currently limited by phages, modifying it to change its coding and thus not express the phages that currently target it might massively increase the population of that bacteria.