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by roywiggins 546 days ago
Not if you engineer your mirror bacterium to eat normal nutrients to get them started. Or they scavenge enough non-chiral molecules to eat that they get the opportunity to evolve the capability on their own.
1 comments

building from non chiral molecules is prototrophy, not scavenging. anyways, existing lifeform already scavenge mirror molecules (especially d-ala since thats used in cell walls) so they are already competing in a quite saturated environment with highly adapted organisms.