American Scientists Discover ‘Xenobots’, But What Are They?
Scientists in the United States have invented the world’s first “biological machines”, a miniature robot created from the cells of the African clawed frog, which can manoeuvre on their own. They have titled the millimetre-wide robots as “xenobots,” after Xenopus laevis, a species of aquatic frog mainly the African clawed frog found across sub-Saharan Africa from Sudan, Nigeria to South Africa.
“Scientists have remodel living cells peel from frog embryos and assembled them into entirely new life-forms,” the University of Vermont said in a press release last week. The xenobots “can locomote towards a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like an antibiotic that needs to be administered to a specific place inside a patient) and can heal themselves after being cut,” the release said.
Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the university who is associated with the new research said, “the novel living machines were neither a conventional robot nor a known species of animal but a new class of creation which is a living and programmable organism.” The new critter were constructed on a supercomputer at the university and then assembled and examined by biologists at Tufts University. “We can envision many useful applications of these living robots that other machines cannot do,” quoted as saying in the release by Michael Levin.
Xenobots can be useful in cleaning radioactive wastes, microplastics in the oceans, can administer medication into human bodies or can remove plaque by travelling through human arteries. The Xenobots can live without supplementary nutrients for weeks in aqueous environments, hence, making them a viable option for the internal administration of medicines.
The new research was published at the event of the National Academy of Sciences (a scalable pipeline for designing programmable organisms). While humans have been controlling organisms for their benefit since at the inception of agriculture and resulted in the creation of artificial organisms by genetic editing. The latest research design is a breakthrough because it is a biological-machine from the ground up.
