Photo: Sandy Huffaker / AFP / Getty Images
By: EFE
Wednesday, November 27
They develop the first robots in history that replicate themselves
Xenobots are millimeter biorobots created from frog cells. The same team that created them, now discovered a new form of biological reproduction so that they can self-replicate, as published today by Pnas.
The team from the universities of Vermont, Tufts and Harvard that unveiled at 2020 early xenobots assembled from frog cells have now made this progress.
Scientists have discovered that these hand-assembled, computer-designed organisms can swim in a petri dish, find individual cells, and collect hundreds of them,
The Pac-Man-shaped xenobot (Pac-Man) keeps these cells inside its “mouth” and is capable of assemble in it “babies”, which a few days later become new xenobots, which can come out, find cells them and build copies of themselves over and over again.
If properly designed, xenobots spontaneously self-replicate, said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-directed the study.
Embryonic cells in a xenopus laevis frog they would turn into skin, but the team put them in a novel context, to give them “the opportunity to reimagine their multicellularity,” leading to something very different, added Michael Levin of Tufts University.
Although cells have the genome of a frog, being “Freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something amazing” , added Lavin.
The lead author of the research, St. Kriegman of the University of Vermont, explained that, on his own, e The parent xenobot is made up of about 3, 04 cells that form a sphere.
“These can make children, but then the system normally dies out. Actually, it is very difficult to get the system to continue reproducing itself. ”
However, thanks to an artificial intelligence program, u n evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation -triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish- to find those that allowed cells to be most effective in the “kinematic” replication, based on movement, that the new research is about.
The scientists asked the supercomputer how to adjust the initial shape of the parent and after months of work came up with several designs, including one that looked like a Pac-Man, which was the The way the xenobot was built, thus developing the biological part of the study.
Kinematic replication is well known at the level of molecules, according to authors, but it had never been observed ford at the scale of cells or whole organisms.
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