Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing have created a mirror-image version of a protein that performs two of the most fundamental processes of life: copying DNA and transcribing it into RNA.
The work is a “small step” along the way to making mirror-image life forms, says molecular biologist Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s a terrific milestone,” adds his Harvard colleague George Church, who hopes one day to create an entire mirror-image cell.
Many organic molecules are ‘chiral’: that is, they can exist in mirror-image forms that cannot be superimposed, like a right-handed and left-handed glove. But life almost always employs one version: cells use left-handed amino acids, and have DNA that twists like a right-handed screw, for instance.
In principle, looking-glass versions of these molecules should work together in the same way as normal ones — but they might be resistant to attack by conventional viruses or enzymes that have not evolved in a looking-glass world.
http://www.nature.com/news/mirror-image-enzyme-copies-looking-glass-dna-1.19918
The work is a “small step” along the way to making mirror-image life forms, says molecular biologist Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s a terrific milestone,” adds his Harvard colleague George Church, who hopes one day to create an entire mirror-image cell.
Many organic molecules are ‘chiral’: that is, they can exist in mirror-image forms that cannot be superimposed, like a right-handed and left-handed glove. But life almost always employs one version: cells use left-handed amino acids, and have DNA that twists like a right-handed screw, for instance.
In principle, looking-glass versions of these molecules should work together in the same way as normal ones — but they might be resistant to attack by conventional viruses or enzymes that have not evolved in a looking-glass world.
http://www.nature.com/news/mirror-image-enzyme-copies-looking-glass-dna-1.19918