These tiny xenobots which came from frog cells are said to be capable of reproducing by itself.
The first robotic life forms with half a millimeter wide are designed by computers and created by hand from the stem cell of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis which was introduced in 2020. At the time, scientists announced the organisms were self-healing and could survive for weeks without food, according to CNN.
Now, scientists at Tufts University, the University of Vemont and Harvard who made the xenobots say the tiny blobs can also self-replicate.
Experiment showed that the organisms can move around their space and find single cells. They would gather hundreds of these cells at once and then placed an offspring inside their mouth. After few days later, the babies become new xenobots that look and do the same things as the others.
Experts published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS on Monday.
"This is profound, "Michael Levin, director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and co-leader of the new research, said in a statement. "These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding."
“If we knew how to tell collections of cells to do what we wanted them to do, ultimately, that’s regenerative medicine — that’s the solution to traumatic injury, birth defects, cancer, and ageing,” Levin said.
“All of these different problems are here because we don’t know how to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build. Xenobots are a new platform for teaching us.”
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