Living robots have become a reality. American scientists have created xenobots – the first biological robots capable of self-replication. The robots were created using heart and skin stem cells from a frog whose Latin name – Xenopus laevis – gives the name xenobot.
These organisms are 1 mm in size and live about one week. Click here to see what they look like.
Their creation was first revealed in 2020, after experiments revealed xenobots’ ability to move, cooperate with other cells, and self-heal.
Xenobotes are fast, agile, and equipped with “memory.” Scientists have also recently reported that they are capable of replication. This is a very different form of biological replication than what has been known until now. When enough of these organisms appear, they can combine to create a new xenobot.
The Xenobots, which were initially spherical and made up of about 3,000 cells, were able to replicate, but this happened very rarely and only under specific circumstances. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers tested billions of body shapes so that more efficient replication would be possible. A supercomputer came up with a C-shaped cell as the best solution. It turned out that with this shape, the xenobot was able to find tiny stem cells, harvest hundreds of them in its body, and a few days later the cell clusters became new xenobots. To create this shape, the researchers used tiny tweezers under a microscope to perform microsurgery on the stem cells to fuse them together. The researchers had to make one cell, fuse it to another, and repeat the process until they had a final structure of 3,000 cells.
The creators also emphasize that the xenobots will never get out of control because they are under constant surveillance and stored in a secure system. It is easy to kill these organisms by changing the environment in which they live, for example, by adding a bit of copper to the vessel in which they live.
The work on these robots is interdisciplinary, as researchers are focusing not only on artificial intelligence, but also on biology or robotics. This robot could be used, for example, to purposefully transport drugs in the human body, or to collect plastic in the oceans.
Scientists have announced that they want to expand their research by creating biological robots from mammalian cells. Their goal would be to increase the intelligence of the robots to the point where they can operate without any human intervention.
Author: Agata Konieczna
