Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), can be defined as synthetic life forms introduced in 2020. These robots consist of a mixture of skin cells and heart muscle cells taken from the embryos in their early stages. However, although their genome is frog, these robots are not frogs.
A computer-designed blueprint can arrange these cells in a configuration that can perform tasks such as moving, pushing or moving objects. In the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Xenobots can also reproduce on their own if the right design is made.
They do this by kinematic replication. This has been done before at the molecular level, but never at this scale. The new study shows that living cells may have far more choice and power than the ways we learn about natural life.
You can watch how these synthetic living robots reproduce in the video below:
Gathering the Xenobot “parents” together, Tufts University senior scientist Dr. “People have long thought they knew all the ways life could reproduce or reproduce. But what is happening now is something that has never been observed before,” Douglas Blackiston said in a press release.
The lead author of the article, Dr. Sam Kriegman, on the other hand, says, “These are frog cells that reproduce very differently than frogs do. No animal or plant known to science reproduces this way.” The copied Xenobot would die quickly once it had reproduced. So the team went back to the artificial intelligence they used to design these living machines and tasked it with producing a version that wouldn’t die. Artificial intelligence performed billions of operations and finally managed to arrive at a configuration that worked.
While some are concerned about self-replicating biotechnology, the team also noted that Xenobots reside in a lab, are easily destroyed, and their work has been scrutinized by federal, state, and corporate ethicists.
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