James Smith

So we could, in principle, use those enzymes as a kind of detection method.

But at the moment, we're not set up to do that.

I think more work on antibiotics could be good.

I'm not sure whether it makes sense to develop new antibiotics or just think through the ones that already exist and figure out how best we could scale them up.

But I think people thinking through that problem might be beneficial.

One set of countermeasures that I don't think will work and that

the world is investing a lot in are mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines, because the way those work is they use your cells to create proteins from them.

So you put an RNA vaccine into your body and then the cells make a protein from the RNA and then you have an immune response against that.

If you were injecting like mirror RNA, your cells can't read that genetic code, so it won't work.

So unfortunately, some of the platforms that we're kind of doing the best at are not going to work here and different approaches, I think, would be needed.

Yeah, so we could actually engineer crops to be able to detect myrobacteria infections.

We could probably engineer them so that some of their pattern recognition receptors were able to bind to some of the common molecules on myrobacteria.

And this is something that also might be worth some further research.

I think we can do that probably to protect a small number of critical crops.

you're going to have to do that for basically every species that you want to protect.

So it's very difficult to scale so that you could protect like the Amazon rainforest and all the different plants in a forest near you.

But it could be done for some key crops, I think.

I actually don't know how difficult it would be to do this for a crop.

I think it would be great for people to think more about this.

The point that I'm trying to make is that it would be impossible to do this for natural environments.