would he be able to metabolize proteins? Carbohydrates? Fats? Nucleic acids? Are there any essential amino acids Harry will be missing?
Only metabolizing fats, glycerol, and the simplest amino acid, glycine. Everything else is chiral, including a hell of a lot of vitamins. Mirror sugars still taste sweet though. I have no idea if mirroring a protease changes its ability to digest protein (for all the good liberating mirror amino acids would do) but know nucleases and starch-degrading enzymes would be useless.
Though for energy alone he could also consume alcohol, acetic acid (think vinegar), and some ketones and aldehydes that are pretty nasty in large quantities but you can get some cellular energy from like acetone. Unable to get any of the essential amino acids histidine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine, or lysine.
Regular bacterial cell walls contain a few mirror amino acids produced enzymatically during wall production—mirrored glutamate, glutamine, and alanine. Not gonna be much. You could probably make about half the nonessential amino acids internally by drinking VERY VERY dilute ammonia (or thicker glycine) and eating fat/alcohol/acetic acid, and the other half of the nonessential ones by drinking VERY VERY dilute ammonia (or thicker glycine) and VERY VERY dilute acetone. Don’t quote me on that, amino acid metabolism is cellular witchcraft with a few rules of thumb to me compared to central carbon metabolism where I do my work. The acetone would also allow things like the production of carbs internally for the purposes of connective tissue renewal and the like faster than the weird still not quite understood in animals very slow production of sugar from fat breakdown products. Though your kidneys and liver would probably fail long before anything in this list was useful.
Levulose (mirror dextrose, as the names indicate) is a good non-caloric sweetener for this reason; it behaves for the chemical purposes of cooking exactly like dextrose. You can’t get it commercially, because it costs too much to manufacture (or so Wikipedia tells me), but it would be perfect if only it were cheap.
Only metabolizing fats, glycerol, and the simplest amino acid, glycine. Everything else is chiral, including a hell of a lot of vitamins. Mirror sugars still taste sweet though. I have no idea if mirroring a protease changes its ability to digest protein (for all the good liberating mirror amino acids would do) but know nucleases and starch-degrading enzymes would be useless.
Though for energy alone he could also consume alcohol, acetic acid (think vinegar), and some ketones and aldehydes that are pretty nasty in large quantities but you can get some cellular energy from like acetone. Unable to get any of the essential amino acids histidine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine, or lysine.
Regular bacterial cell walls contain a few mirror amino acids produced enzymatically during wall production—mirrored glutamate, glutamine, and alanine. Not gonna be much. You could probably make about half the nonessential amino acids internally by drinking VERY VERY dilute ammonia (or thicker glycine) and eating fat/alcohol/acetic acid, and the other half of the nonessential ones by drinking VERY VERY dilute ammonia (or thicker glycine) and VERY VERY dilute acetone. Don’t quote me on that, amino acid metabolism is cellular witchcraft with a few rules of thumb to me compared to central carbon metabolism where I do my work. The acetone would also allow things like the production of carbs internally for the purposes of connective tissue renewal and the like faster than the weird still not quite understood in animals very slow production of sugar from fat breakdown products. Though your kidneys and liver would probably fail long before anything in this list was useful.
Levulose (mirror dextrose, as the names indicate) is a good non-caloric sweetener for this reason; it behaves for the chemical purposes of cooking exactly like dextrose. You can’t get it commercially, because it costs too much to manufacture (or so Wikipedia tells me), but it would be perfect if only it were cheap.