James Smith

The challenge has been making big proteins and we're getting better at doing that.

I think it's more likely that this is a trial and error type problem where you need to be doing a lot of experimentation.

So AI could be helpful if it's able to do a lot of this troubleshooting directly.

But to do that, you're going to need quite a lot of wet lab footprint, which doesn't make it impossible.

That means that I think it would be more difficult than a design task.

Yeah.

There are actually other pathways through which mirror life could plausibly be created.

So there's one called the stepwise conversion pathway, which would basically mean you start with a normal cell and then you engineer it so that it can create mirror components within it.

So you make a second ribosome that's able to

to make mirror proteins, and then gradually you convert it completely into a mirror cell.

In that scenario, it's possible that for engineering the ribosome, it could be helpful to use biodesign tools or something.

I'm still not sure that it would be necessarily that helpful.

Another way AI could help is through engineering the genome to make it easy to boot.

So it might be the case that some genomes are just inherently easier to boot life from.

Maybe you need to like start in a certain place in the genome and do everything in a particular order to get it to work.

And so maybe you could be using genome design tools to think through that.

Okay.

There's not going to be any data on this sort of thing.

So I think...

We are talking about AI that would be very advanced because it's not going to have much to draw on.