Robot or organism?
The xenobots developed by American scientists last year are neither. Considered a new form of life, the first "living robots", organizations that can be programmed. Now, the same scientists have announced that xenobots can now reproduce in a different way from plants and animals.
The xenobots are derived from the stem cells of the African frog Xenopus laevis and are less than one millimeter in size. They can move, work in groups and heal themselves.
Now, scientists from the University of Vermont and Harvard have discovered a completely new form of biological reproduction that was not previously known to science.
"We are surprised. "Frogs have a way of reproducing that they use, but when you release the cells from the rest of the fetus and give them a chance to figure out how to survive in a new environment, they not only understand how to move but they also find a new way to reproduce.", the scientists noted.
The team found that xenobots, which were originally spherical in shape and consisted of 3.000 cells, could reproduce, but this rarely happened. They used "kinetic replication", which takes place at the molecular level but has never been observed at the cell or organism scale.
With the help of artificial intelligence, researchers have tested billions of different shapes to make xenobots more capable of reproduction. They came up with a C-shape reminiscent of Pac-Man, with which the xenobot could collect tiny stem cells with its "mouth" and over days this concentration became new xenobots.
While the prospect of self-reproducing biotechnology may be of concern to many, scientists believe that in the future they could be used in a variety of fields, such as marine microplastics and pharmaceuticals.
The research was published in PNAS.
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