"People have thought for quite a long time that we've worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. We're giving them a chance to reimagine their multicellularity."Īnd what they imagine is something far different than skin. "But we're putting them into a novel context. "They would be sitting on the outside of a tadpole, keeping out pathogens and redistributing mucus," says Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and co-leader of the new research. In a Xenopus laevis frog, these embryonic cells would develop into skin. The results of the new research were published November 29, 2021, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "With the right design-they will spontaneously self-replicate," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.
The same team that built the first living robots ( "Xenobots," assembled from frog cells-reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble "baby" Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth"-that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.Īnd then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction-and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.
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