ABOVE: A “manufactured organism” built from embryonic frog cells
SAM KRIEGMAN
Cells extracted from a frog embryo can be sculpted to create new shapes and carry out unique functions in a structure that’s not-quite-organism and not-quite-machine, researchers report today (January 13) in PNAS.
“My first reaction to the article was: Holy moly, this is potentially huge,” Pamela Lyon tells The Scientist in an email. Lyon is a cognitive biologist at the University of Adelaide who was not involved in the study but is collaborating on a different project with Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University and a senior author on the study.
The researchers designed and built so-called xenobots that could locomote across the bottom of a petri dish. They also designed structures that could manipulate and transport other objects. When several designs were housed together, they began to exhibit “collective behaviors” such as orbiting one another or temporarily ...
