The world won’t be the same anymore. Humanity itself brings closer the reality that writers and cinematographers working in the genre of fiction love so much. In it, robots reproduce themselves without asking permission from their creator. And a person in this reality is assigned a certain secondary role, depending on the situation.
Last year, American scientists with the help of a supercomputer developed biorobots – living machines from frog embryonic cells. And now it turned out that they can spontaneously reproduce.
What are these organisms?
In January 2020, it became known about a successful experiment by biologists at Tufts University (USA). They took an embryo of an African clawed frog, isolated stem cells from it, manually separated them and placed them in a Petri dish. There these cells joined together and formed a new organism of microscopic (less than a millimeter) size, a tiny clot of pink flesh. He could move, group, push small loads, find set targets and recover from damage.
In fact, such clots became the first biorobots in history consisting of living cells. Scientists called them xenobots in honor of the Latin name of the frog (Xenopus laevis). But what does robots have to do with it at all? Why can’t we just call it a synthetic organism?
And the thing is that the appearance and behavior of xenobots were set by artificial intelligence. With the help of a supercomputer, scientists have made calculations determining what these microscopic creatures should look like and what they should do. AI analyzed billions of potential body shapes and found the ideal one that would allow frog cells to produce so-called kinetic replication. This process usually occurs at the molecular level, on the scale of whole cells or organisms, it has not been observed before.
What can they do?
The unique organisms created in accordance with the computer program participated in the tests last year.They moved in concert and explored the habitat, feeding on germinal energy reserves. In later experiments, they moved in a circle, pushed pellets placed in the liquid (both singly and together) and even transported them on their bodies.
A new work by American scientists shows that xenobots are capable of more: reproducing their own kind. Actually, they were created for this purpose: to study the possibilities of self-reproducing systems. When AI tested different forms of biorobots’ bodies, it focused precisely on making them more efficient at replication. Triangles, squares, pyramids, asterisks were analyzed, and as a result, the supercomputer settled on a C-shape.
The experiment showed that artificial intelligence was right. It was with this body shape that xenobots were able to create their own kind. They collect separately floating cells in a Petri dish, hold them inside their mouth, and form cubs.After a few days, they become adults, look and move just like the rest. This process was repeated over and over again:a group of 12 xenobots, using 60 thousand cells, created one or two new generations.
“These cells carry the frog genome, but once freed from turning into tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence and plasticity to do something amazing,” says Sam Kriegman, lead author of the study. — They reproduce in a completely different way than frogs do. No animal or plant known to science reproduces in this way.
Why are they needed?
Reproduction of robots (especially live ones!) it can puzzle anyone. Imagination draws scenes from the Terminator or some kind of Robot Uprising, where machines have gone out of control and are trying to enslave people. The authors of the study assure that there is nothing to be afraid of. Not yet, anyway. The organisms created by them are in a controlled environment, and if desired, it can be easily destroyed.
But what are they for anyway? Experiments conducted by American scientists show that it is possible to put a computer program into an artificially created biological object (representing, in fact, a new form of life) and force it to perform the same actions repeatedly. According to the researchers, such biorobots can be used to search for traces of radioactive contamination, collect microplastics in the ocean or clean blood vessels from plaques. Of the medical applications, they also mention the development of vaccines against new viruses and the creation of medicines.
Xenobots will be able to survive in an aquatic environment without additional nutrients for several days or even weeks. And after recycling, they will become a part of nature and will not cause any harm to it, unlike metal or plastic, from which ordinary robots are made.
