[Korea Youth Assembly News / Reporter Lee Sung-jun] There is a Pokemon Mewtwo, the Pokemon constructed by the combination of human technology and a gene from a Pokemon named Mew. This combination is no longer a fantasy now.Twenty years ago, or more, people thought about the combination of life and non-life—the robot that has life like a human, combining living things' tissue with metal or plastic, producing a living organism. Nobody can accurately predict when this technology will appear in real life. However, the research from professors Sam Kriegman et al. at the University of Tufts may tell us this is not far off in the future. In January 2020, Professor Michael Levin's research team at the University of Tufts created a "Xenobot Algorithm" using a supercomputer. It simulates the connection of heart cells and skin cells to construct a robot in the desired form.
Through this innovative simulation, the research team made virtual hearts and skin into three-dimensional images. Moreover, they removed the stem cells from African toenail frog embryos and differentiated them into skin cells and heart muscle cells. These cells were combined at the exact location in 3D to implement cell robots. The Xenobot combines hundreds of cells to form complete heart cells and skin cells. Surprisingly, the size of the Xenobot is less than 1 mm, with the round ball-shaped cell mass.
Skin cells serve as the body and skeleton of the robot, and heart cells power it to move forward while repeating contraction and relaxation. In the Xenobot experiment, the robot moved for about 30 seconds by repeating contraction and relaxation with heart cells. After operating for a week or up to 10 days, the energy was exhausted, and the Xenobot died. As living things rot and disappear after death, the cells of robots are also rotting on their own. This shows that this robot is eco-friendly as it does not create metal waste like other metal robots.
Xenobots are still developing over time by adding extra abilities. The Xenobot 2.0 could move faster, have a longer lifespan, and change body color to something similar to the surrounding environment by using hair-like legs called Cilia on the cell surface. It even has a self-healing ability.
Now researchers are in the process of creating Xenobot 3.0, which can self-reproduce. When researchers exposed Xenobots to culture plates with more than 60,000 stem cells, Genobots collected the surrounding stem cells and reproduced offspring smaller than them. They can only reproduce until the second generation due to their diminishing size. On the other hand, Professor Levin of the University of Tufts commented, "Genobot has a very different mode of reproduction than the frogs, and brought stem cells. and This suggested a new breeding method."
The Xenobot research team is now expecting to use Xenobots to deliver drugs into the human body or scratch blood clots in blood vessels. There are endless potential uses in the environmental and medical fields using the robot's self-replication method, including wounds, cancer cells, organ transplants, and treatment of congenital malformations.
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