Keep it light, keep it moving.
I am doing no harm.

  • 3 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • I get what you’re saying. Sorry people are misinterpreting and misconstruing your comment and making you out to be some sort of evil antivaxxer. You’re right in the way that pathogens exploit these quirks to their full extent and would be an invisible threat if they managed to mimic our molecules and become undetectable and indestructible to our immune system by their very nature.

    Although you’re right about how autoimmunity generally works, the molecular mimicry causing autoimmunity that you mentioned is the exact opposite of the experts’ concerns. For example, left-handed pathogens’ topology (the molecular surface that the immune system “feels” for and detects) would be a mirror image, so there’s probably no risk of autoimmunity since it’s entirely different to your own proteins from your immune system’s point of view.

    But the main concern is how our immune systems are simply not be equipped to handle the mirror molecules once detected. It’d be unable to break them down via precise enzymatic degradation, which in turn would limit recognition via antigen presentation from one cell to another down the line, rendering our body unable to coordinate. We’d need to evolve an entirely new set of enzymes and strategies to handle this.

    Here’s a better article that makes a better job at explaining the experts’ concerns:
    https://phys.org/news/2024-12-mirror-bacteria-pose-global-health.html