Original story from Wyss Institute (MA, USA). In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers demonstrate that functional nervous systems can form within self-organized living cellular robots, conferring complex movement patterns and distinct gene expression profiles. Biobots, whose growing line of variants started with Xenobots, are fascinating, tiny, self-powered living robots built exclusively using frog embryonic cells. Originally developed in the laboratories of Wyss Institute (MA, USA) Associate Faculty member and Tufts University (MA, USA) Professor Michael Levin and his collaborators at University of Vermont (VT, USA), biobots are remarkably motile, moving autonomously through aqueous environments. Since then, the team has shed light on many exciting properties of biobots, including their ability for kinematic self-replication and responding to sound stimuli. Biobots can similarly be constructed using human cells in the form of Anthrobots, which have the ability to heal neural wounds in vitro. Thus, a vision emerged that biobots, made out of patients’ own cells, could one day be deployed to repair spinal cord or retinal nerve damage, clear plaques from the arteries, locally deliver pro-regenerative drugs and perform other vital tasks in the human body. More fundamentally, Levin explained, “Such novel beings, exhibiting both new morphology and behavior, despite their wild-type unmodified genome, can reveal important aspects of multicellular plasticity, of relevance to evolutionary biology, bioengineering and regenerative medicine. They uniquely enable us to investigate questions like ‘What is the origin of anatomical and physiological properties in living forms that have no history of selection for those traits?’ and ‘What determines the…
