James Smith

So people have made DNA polymerases, which copy DNA, replicate DNA.

So that's a key part of this.

They've also made RNA polymerases which transcribe DNA into RNA in mirror form.

They've made the RNA polymerase in mirror form and then taken mirror DNA that's made synthetically.

transcribed that right into rna okay so it's like pretty amazing yeah and and all of these have to be made using chemistry not through life so they're making these really complicated molecules using using chemistry and using like clever tricks to kind of stitch them stitch them together and get them to work using that rna polymerase people have been able to make the ribosomal rna which

by weight is 70% of the ribosome.

So although we can't make the full mirror ribosome yet.

Yeah, we are able to make a good chunk of it.

The really difficult thing left to do is

put all of the parts of the mirror ribosome together correctly.

So in principle, we can already make proteins that are big enough to make a whole ribosome.

So we would be able to make all 54 proteins that you need if we tried hard enough, probably.

But putting them together in the right order such that they fold properly, interact properly, and then we'll be able to translate RNA into proteins is really difficult and not something that people have done yet.

calls for or that like means that all of the like mirror cells are created um which makes all the mirror all the organs mirrored or something like that does that make sense yeah it does make sense and it's a really good question the because a bacterium has loads of stuff in it has loads of proteins loads of things in its membrane it's just very complicated

We don't know for sure what you need to boot up a cell, but it might be the case that all you need is basically the central dogma plus a genome encapsulated in a membrane, as long as you can get the central dogma to read the genome.

And so it might be the case that once you can make the full central dogma, you're actually really quite close to being able to make a mirror cell.

Might not be the case.

We don't know for sure.

But that I think is a way that this could happen relatively quickly.

It's probably worth saying that we've been able to make mirror proteins and mirror DNA and mirror RNA for quite a long time.