"It's a step toward using computer-designed organisms for intelligent drug delivery," says Bongard. When researchers created further designs for the bots, they found that they could design them to push microscopic objects, and even carry objects through a pouch.
And just like a capsized turtle, it could no longer move. In order to test if the living robots were truly moving the way they were designed to, and not just randomly, researchers performed a test that has stumped many a living creature.
AUTO FOLLOW XENOBOT SKIN
These cells naturally contract and expand on their own, meaning that they could serve as the xenobots’ engine, or legs, and help move the rest of the organism, which was built out of more static skin cells. To achieve this, researchers put cardiac cells on the bottom of the xenobot. Then, like sculptors (if sculptors used microsurgery forceps and electrodes), biologists manually shaped the cells into clumps that matched the computer designs.ĭifferent structures were sketched out by the computer in accordance with the scientists’ goal for each xenobot.įor example, one xenobot was designed to be able to move purposely in a specific direction. The designs then went to Tufts University, where the embryonic cells were collected and separated to develop into more specialized cells. The bots are made out of stem cells taken from frog embryos - specifically, an African clawed frog called “xenopus laevis,” which supplied the inspiration for the name “xenobot.” To design the xenobots, the possible configurations of different cells were first modeled on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont. all “degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side-effects.”Īfter realizing that the best “self-renewing and biocompatible materials” would be “living systems themselves,” researchers decided to create a method “that designs completely biological machines from the ground up.” In the introduction for the research published in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS) on Monday, researchers point out that the traditional building blocks we’ve used for robots and tech - steel, plastic, chemicals, etc.
“It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism." "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal,” said researcher Joshua Bongard in a news release. Tiny in size, but vast in potential, these millimetre-sized bots could potentially be programmed to help in medical procedures, ocean cleanup and investigating dangerous compounds, among other things. Forget gleaming metal droids - the robots of the future may have more in common with the average amphibian than with R2D2.Ī team of scientists have found a way to not just program a living organism, but to build brand new life-forms from scratch using cells, creating what researchers are calling “xenobots.”