James Smith

And so a lot of this binding isn't going to work.

So to take an example, in the innate immune system, which is kind of the first line of defense that the immune system has, for that to be activated, you have these things called pattern recognition receptors, which...

basically bind to molecules on invading bacteria.

And those molecules on the invading bacteria are chiral.

So examples would be bacterial DNA or flagellin, which is a protein in the bacterial tail.

And in mirror bacteria, those would be reversed.

So they wouldn't bind properly to the pattern recognition receptors.

And that means that the innate immune system wouldn't be activated properly.

That's important because the immune system is actually highly interdependent.

Ruslan Medsetov, who was one of the co-authors on the science paper, discovered that the adaptive immune system, which mounts your antibody response, depends on the innate immune system to work.

So just breaking this one part can kind of break the whole immune system.

But with myrobacteria, it wouldn't just be breaking this one part.

There are other parts that we think wouldn't work too.

And we can look at, there are lots of analogies from humans and mice that we can look at to sort of see how that plays out in experiments.

I think what you described is the way that chirality is important in general across a lot of biological interactions.

I think the best analogy is probably a hand in a glove.

So if you think about an immune receptor as a glove, let's say it's a right-handed glove.

Right-handed gloves fit right hands very well.

And the pathogen's molecules, let's say they're the right hands.

If instead you're trying to put a left hand into a right handed glove, it's not going to go in properly.