Living Robots…?

1/15/2020

In one of the latest new breakthroughs, scientists have found a way to create an organism that is technically a robot, but is made from living cells…WHAT?! A living robot, basically! These little creatures are called “Xenobots.” Created from living cells scraped from frog embryos, specifically embryos from African frogs which is scientifically known as Xenopus laevis, this new organism is insanely cool. They’re about a millimeter wide and have the ability to move, pick objects up, and even heal themselves!

Michael Levin, director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University, made the statement “We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can’t do, like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering micro plastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque.” Creating these creatures was not an easy process and required a lot of trial and error before finding the perfect design. After the designs were narrowed down, they turned them into life! A process that included adding the stem cells from the frog embryos, incubation, separation, and reformation, the outcome was absolutely impressive.

Some people are kind of freaked out about this crazy new technology, given the fact that it’s a super small yet extremely powerful organism. As, I guess, is somewhat understandable not knowing exactly the extent of these powerful little creatures’ abilities. However, this is also an opening door to so many new advances and discoveries in other technology, I wonder how exactly it will be utilized. What do you think?! 

Click the link for the full article by University of Vermont and Joshua E. Brown. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200113175653.htm

University of Vermont. “Living robots built using frog cells: Tiny ‘xenobots’ assembled from cells promise advances from drug delivery to toxic waste clean-up.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 January 2020.

Journal Reference: 

1. Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard. A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms. PNAS, 2020 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910837117