Scientists say they’ve witnessed a never-before-seen type of replication in organic robots created in the lab using frog cells. Among other things, the findings could have implications for regenerative medicine.
The discovery involves a xenobot – a simple, “programmable” organism that is created by assembling stem cells in a Petri dish — and is described by a team of researchers from Tufts University, Harvard University and the University of Vermont in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“You can think about this like using the different cells [as] building blocks like you would build with LEGO or with Minecraft,” Douglas Blackiston, a co-author of the study, tells NPR.
The researchers hope that one day these xenobots — described by the same team in a paper published nearly two years ago — could be programmed to perform useful functions such as finding cancer cells in the human body or trapping harmful microplastics in the ocean.
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