American scientists who created the first robots say that life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce. Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, the xenobots are less than a millimeter long.
Now scientists who developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering say they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction unlike any animal or plant known to science.
” Frogs have a mode of reproduction that they use normally, but when you free the cells from the rest of the embryo and give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment they discover a new way to move. , but they also find a new way to reproduce,” said Allen at Tufts University, who co-authored the study.
Robots or organisms ?
Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have the ability to develop into different types of cells. To make the xenobots, the researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and let them incubate. There is no manipulation of genes.
” In that way it’s a robot, but it’s also clearly an organism made from non-genetically modified frog cells,” said Josh Bongard, a professor of computer science and robotics, an expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study.
Bongard said they discovered that the xenobots, which were originally spherical and made of about 3,000 cells, could reproduce. But this happened rarely and only in specific circumstances./CNN