Mirror life: a Deadly Geometry

Recently, some scientists have started on the road to creating ‘mirror microbes’, synthetic bacteria whose building blocks are mirror-images of their natural counterparts.

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Recently an international group of scientists published a 300-page technical report and a commentary in the journal Science warning against efforts to build mirror life.

What is Chirality?

Chirality refers to the property of objects or molecules having a handedness (left or right), where they cannot be superimposed on their mirror images.
g. A bottle cap is unscrewed anti-clockwise in the real world but appears clockwise in a mirror.
Mirror Life: Mirror life refers to organisms whose building blocks are enantiomers of their natural counterparts.
Molecular Chirality: Enantiomers
- Molecules that are mirror images of each other are called enantiomers.
- Each enantiomer has distinct properties and biological effects, despite having the same chemical composition.

Examples of Enantiomers

Thalidomide:
- It is a sedative drug which was sold in the late 1950s.
- Right-handed enantiomer: Worked as a sedative.
- Left-handed enantiomer: Caused severe birth defects, leading to the drug’s withdrawal.
In the Human Body:
- Proteins: Built using left-handed amino acids.
- DNA: The double-helix twists to the right.
- The reasons behind this preference for specific handedness in life forms remain a mystery.