James Smith

I think it could be great for people to be making more mirror environments, putting bacteria in them, seeing how they survive.

But the data that we have at the moment suggests that this is not going to be a problem.

I think it's possible.

I mean, if there was a myrobacteria outbreak, then I'm sure it would make sense to try stuff like this.

I don't think it would be a very good preventive measure because I'm sure there would be other impacts that we haven't thought about of changing the whole of the world's ecosystem in one go.

And I actually think there are probably more promising countermeasures that would kind of spread on their own that might be worth talking about more.

So mirror phages are one example.

We talked about phages already, which are the viruses that infect bacteria.

Normal phage wouldn't be able to infect mirror bacteria because the mirror bacteria can't read the genetic code of the phage.

But you could synthetically make a mirror phage or a mirror virus that would be able to infect mirror bacteria.

Phage are one of the main things in the wild that kill bacteria and they replicate when they kill the bacteria.

So you could use this as a way to control the population of myrobacteria to some extent.

The difficulty is that you can't use them to completely wipe out a myrobacteria population because you need a certain density of the host population for the phage to be able to replicate.

Exactly.

You end up getting these kind of population dynamics where the prey population will drop.

That then means that the predator population drops, which then means that the prey population can expand again, which then causes the predator population to expand.

And so you end up with this kind of like up and down trend.

But it's very difficult to completely eliminate a host species in this way.

And we've never been able to use a biological control to completely eliminate.

make extinct a species that we've tried to do this with.