XENOBOTS: BREAKTHROUGH IN THE FIELD OF LIVING ROBOTS

In 2020, Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont, Harvard and Tufts University used artificial intelligence (AI) to create biological robots called Xenobots.

Xenobot was named after the species of aquatic frog Xenopus laevis, found across sub-Saharan Africa from Nigeria and Sudan to South Africa. They are neither  traditional robot nor a known species of animal. According to Kriegman they are organisms because they are made of stem cells and can reproduce. But they are also robots because they can move on their own and perform physical labor. 

Thus, it belongs to a new class having a living, programmable organism.

 When scientists extracted skin stem cells from frog embryos and cultured them in salt water then Xenobots were born. Later on, the cells clumped together and cells on the outside of these clumps developed cilia, which allowed the clumps to move.

Xenobots can self-replicate. Xenobots, a type of programmable organism made from frog cells, can replicate by spontaneously sweeping up loose stem cells. This could have implications for regenerative medicine.

Applications:

It is used to search nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, travelling in arteries to scrape out plaque, etc.

Also it is used as a scientific tool to understand how cells cooperate to build complex bodies during morphogenesis.

In future clinical trials, such as targeted drug delivery, xenobots could be made from a human patient’s own cells, which would bypass the immune response challenges of other kinds of micro-robotic delivery systems. Such xenobots could potentially be used to scrape plaque from arteries and with additional cell types and bioengineering, locate and treat disease.