Pause work on ‘mirror life’, recommends panel of international experts

Efforts to create ‘mirror life’ – life whose building blocks have the opposite handedness to life on Earth – should be prohibited, an international group of experts has recommended. The group warns that mirror microorganisms could potentially cause lethal infection in humans, animals and plants.

All life on Earth shares the same chirality or handedness. Nucleic acids are right-handed, while proteins are left-handed. But some researchers want to create mirror life in which the chirality of biological molecules is reversed. The chirality of biomolecules matters as interactions between them relies on them having a complementary shape. Researchers have been interested in creating mirror life because of the possibility that it could result in organisms with different properties which might make them useful for certain applications, such as producing new therapeutics.