we’re 10–30 years away, but: Only $500 million to $1 billion could potentially be sufficient and accelerate this timeline
This is not great. However, the virus immunity is a huge part, maybe the majority of, the issue for getting competitive advantage for wrecking the biosphere and unlike mirror life, virus immunity is very commercially valuable. And it’s not a future projection, this was made in 2024 and the containment strategy seems kinda not the thing you want to bet the biosphere on.
One important difference is that recoded bacterial strains, while immune to phage, experience a very wide range of fitness defects due to breaking of adaptive epistatic interactions by the recoding. These defects are very significant even in controlled lab environments, with recoded strains growing very slowly. In heterogenous environments these problems are even more severe. Mirror bacteria would not experience these defects as all genetic interactions would be preserved (although, without further engineering, they would not have an optimal nutrient acquisition profile).
I agree that this kind of work deserves scrutiny, however.
And wouldn’t you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don’t have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I’d mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.
This is not great. However, the virus immunity is a huge part, maybe the majority of, the issue for getting competitive advantage for wrecking the biosphere and unlike mirror life, virus immunity is very commercially valuable. And it’s not a future projection, this was made in 2024 and the containment strategy seems kinda not the thing you want to bet the biosphere on.
I think the people concerned about mirror life have a much more urgent warm up, right now: New Synthetic E. coli Is Immune to Bacteriophage Infection
I think you linked to the wrong article?
One important difference is that recoded bacterial strains, while immune to phage, experience a very wide range of fitness defects due to breaking of adaptive epistatic interactions by the recoding. These defects are very significant even in controlled lab environments, with recoded strains growing very slowly. In heterogenous environments these problems are even more severe. Mirror bacteria would not experience these defects as all genetic interactions would be preserved (although, without further engineering, they would not have an optimal nutrient acquisition profile).
I agree that this kind of work deserves scrutiny, however.
ops, yup, fixed link.
And wouldn’t you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don’t have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I’d mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.