[treyd]

https://archive.is/5MhOW

Why wouldn't it work in the other direction though? The mirror cells would be competing for the same ambidextrous resources (for my lack of a better term). Sugar is chiral isnt it? Would they be able to digest normal chiral resources?

[rolph]

pick up your house key, hold it in front of a mirror, look at the key, and the reflection. you should notice the side of key away from mirror is visible, the reflection shows the other side of key .

so the sides of key, and reflection are switched relative to the key.

if you could somhow pluck the reflection from a mirror and try to use it, the left side is right, and right side is left.

when this happens with molecules, there is different parts of the molecules being brought together, leading to alternate interactions, thus different reaction path

[cyberax]

Sugars are chiral. The wrong-handed glucose would be a great sugar replacement, but it's too expensive to synthesize.

The only major non-chiral nutritional molecules are fatty acids.

[Animats]

> The wrong-handed glucose would be a great sugar replacement, but it's too expensive to synthesize.

That's not the problem. There's a recent patent on synthesizing L-glucose cheaply.[1] The problem is that L-glucose turns out to be a strong laxative.[2]

Levoglucose (L-glucose) is the stereoisomer of D-glucose. L-Glucose does not occur naturally in higher living organisms, but can be synthesized in the laboratory. L-Glucose is indistinguishable in taste from D-glucose, but cannot be used by living organisms as source of energy because it cannot be phosphorylated by hexokinase, the first enzyme in the glycolysis pathway. Levoglucose may be used as diagnostic aid. It has been investigated as a non-nutritive food sweetener. However, L-glucose produced significant laxation, with an average of 4 to 5 loose watery stools in a 24-hour period. This laxative property clearly reduced the use of L-glucose as a food additive. The mechanism of laxation after L-glucose ingestion is unknown, but malabsorption of the compound with secondary osmotic diarrhea is likely. L-glucose is a well-tolerated, safe, and efficacious means of cleansing the colon for colonoscopy.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015068724A1/en

[2] https://drugs.ncats.io/drug/02833ISA66

[pixl97]

Ah the Haribo sugar free gummi bear effect.

[bitwize]

Reminds me of how some of the races from Mass Effect (notably turians and quarians) have the opposite chirality to our own, which means humans can't be nourished by their food and vice-versa. Interspecies sex is also complicated by this difference, so turians and quarians tend to date each other (when they date outside their species).