Science is growing. Now scientists can make robots made of living cells that can reproduce. The robot is named Xenobot, after the African frog (Xenopus laevis), a synthetic living creature that was first announced in 2020. They are made from a mixture of skin cells and heart muscle cells from the early stages of frog embryos. However, despite their genome, they are not frogs.
"People have thought for a long time that we have figured out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that has never been observed before," said co-author Dr Douglas Blackiston, the senior scientist at Tufts University who assembled the Xenobot 'parent'. in a press statement.
"These are frog cells that replicate in a very different way from the way (actual) frogs do. No animal or plant is known to science to replicate this way," added lead author Dr Sam Kriegman of Tuft's Allen Center.
The replicating version of Xenobot will die quickly after being reproduced once. So the team again made use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simply put, there is an AI tasked with producing a version that doesn't die easily. This AI ended up doing billions of simulations, until at one configuration, the AI managed to find that version.
"We asked the supercomputers at UVM (University of Vermont) to figure out how to adapt the shape of the initial parent, and the AI came up with some odd designs over the months. That included one that resembled Pac-Man," said Kriegman.
In the end, the team sent the results to Douglas and he made this parent Xenobot in the form of Pac-Man. Then from the 'parents', Xenobot produces children, which then produce grandchildren, to great-grandchildren.
There is much concern about their findings, but the team stresses that Xenobots in the easily killed lab have been vetted by federal, state, and institutional ethicists. However, these findings do not end just like that.
"Xenobot is a new platform to teach us," said the research team.