Name: Mirror Bacteria Could Destroy All Life As We Know It
Uploaded: 2025-11-21T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 8 min 15 s
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In December 2024, a report came out about a potential upcoming global catastrophe.

38 scientists had teamed up to issue a warning.

They predicted how devastating this catastrophe could be and proposed what we could do to prevent it from happening.

If this was your typical Hollywood movie, the catastrophe would be something utterly sensational.

Like an asteroid the size of Texas smashing into actual Texas.

Or some tech bros AI software gaining sentience and starting the crusade against all life on the planet.

The reality might sound boring by comparison, but I don't think that it is so.

The scientists were raising awareness about so-called mirror bacteria, a type of synthetic bacteria whose molecules are all back to front.

The threat they pose is right up there with anything Hollywood could throw at us.

To understand the true threat of mirror bacteria, we have to start with the chirality or handedness of molecules.

The biomolecules that make up both you and the oodles of microbes living inside of you all feature carbon atoms.

And to make the molecules, each carbon atom can make up to four chemical bonds with other atoms.

Sometimes they bind in such a way that they create something chiral.

You can wind up with getting either a left handed or a right handed version of the molecule.

There's no way to rotate left handed molecules to make it indistinguishable from its right handed twin.

But when it comes to very important biomolecules like DNA or proteins, life needs them to always have the same handedness.

So way back in the planet's primordial soup days, life basically had to pick sides in literally every living thing on earth.

DNA and RNA are right handed and proteins are left handed.

When I say DNA is right handed, I'm talking about the configuration of the sugars inside the DNA molecule being right handed, not the twist of the helix.

Usually the helix is also right handed, but it can be left handed.

In fact, SciShow has covered that before.

But the DNA sugars, they are all right, alright?

Anyway, our left handed proteins can interact with right handed DNA no problem.

Trying to work with a right handed protein would be like trying to put your right shoe on your left foot.

The reason that we know all of this is scientists can make heterochiral DNA and proteins.

In other words, the mirror versions of what nature churns out.

And experiments have proven that our left-handed protein enzymes mostly can't react with right-handed versions of the proteins they're supposed to.

But this actually isn't always a bad thing.

Heterochiral components antigens are useful in drugs because the body can't break them down as easily.

These drugs have plenty of normal chiral parts that can interface with proteins in your body.

But some of the building blocks are heterochiral, so the drug has a longer half life.

Also, those heterochiral molecules are less likely to trigger an immune response, which is great for therapeutic applications.

So drugs of this nature are an active area of RD and they're not considered a threat to our existence.

In fact, one that treats chronic kidney disease is already approved and in use.

And a cancer targeting one is in clinical trials.

But if scientists can already make heterochiral DNA and proteins, can they use those building blocks to make something way more complicated?

Labs are still working on synthetic bacteria made out of the regular stuff, let alone the mirror stuff.

But once that box gets ticked off the proverbial to-do list, it'll likely be pretty straightforward to make the jump.

Plus, we wouldn't need to engineer a whole mirror environment in including mirror food to sustain these new mirror bacteria.

That's because a lot of nutrients aren't chiral molecules at all.

They can be metabolized by both normal or mirror proteins.

Basically, a future earth populated by mirror life isn't imminent.

But the scientists behind this warning think it's definitely possible.

And there has been some funding put towards that goal already.

No, not by a mad billionaire trying to wipe out everyone so that they can reset evolution on the planet and play God.

Although given how we open this episode, you might be wondering, if not that, then who and why?

Well, there's interest for a couple of reasons.

As far as we know, life evolved just once on this planet.

So some scientists wonder whether our specific chirality setup is a coincidence that evolution just decided to run with.

If they could create and observe mirror bacteria,

they might wind up proving that right-handed DNA and left-handed proteins are actually better suited for life on Earth.

Meanwhile, there's also a more pragmatic goal.

Remember those next gen drugs that are part mirror molecules?

Well, right now those molecules are tricky to make synthetically, so scientists could potentially use mirror bacteria as tiny factories.

And yet the authors of that 2024 report proposed a ban on funding projects to create mirror life and stringent regulation and oversight on any research that is mirror molecule Y.

Well, basically, it boils down to the fact that all our defenses against bacteria are based on chiral chemistry.

Just like a left shoe doesn't fit particularly well on our right foot.

Most of our current antibacterial tools aren't compatible with mirror bacteria's biomolecules.

While there are some classes that don't care about handedness, most existing antibiotics are chiral.

And while it might be possible to make mirror antibiotics, in some cases, it's neither a quick process nor guaranteed to work.

Then there's the human immune system, which itself relies on recognition to activate its bacteria destroying mode.

That's not an option if the bacterial proteins are mirrored and effectively invisible to our detector proteins.

But even if our immune system could sidestep that hurdle to at least figure out that the body had been invaded,

our enzymes that digest bacterial proteins likely wouldn't work on the mirror life.

And before you think maybe nature has a way to destroy those bacteria before they get into our bodies, well, there are viruses that help keep populations down.

They propagate by hijacking the bacterium's proteins and then killing it.

Yeah, it's the protein problem once again.

Bacteria also have predators, but they might not be able to digest the mirror version of their food.

And bacteria do battle amongst themselves, too.

But their weapons are biological in nature, and they likely wouldn't work in the mirrorverse. All that's to say.

According to this group of scientists, mirror bacteria would be invisible to most natural forms of defense that survived billions of years of evolution.

So the concern isn't that they would cause some kind of disease.

It's that once they got inside you, whether it's through a cut in your skin or one of your many mucous membranes,

they'd multiply unchecked and eat up all of the nutrients in your body.

They might even damage your body due to their sheer mass.

But it's not just our defenses that would conk out in this scenario.

The same would apply to other animals and plants.

So if an infected human sheds some mirror bacteria out into the world

you might have to say goodbye to agriculture, not to mention a bunch of living things you don't plan to eat.

Maybe human ingenuity could come up with some sort of countermeasures.

But not before a significant loss of life.

And the report proposes it wouldn't be enough to ever stop the damage.

They would merely prolong the inevitable.

Of course, it's worth noting that other scientists have argued all of this fear is premature,

and bans could stymie unrelated research.

But they do agree with those 38 authors on one thing:

it is important that we have a robust discussion about the risks and benefits of this technology before actually doing it.

Meanwhile, if Hollywood wants to make a movie about a world in which we're all getting slowly filled up by a bunch of microscopic, mindless mirrorverse soldiers, I'm not gonna go watch it.