Artificial Life  

Scientists have created a bio-robotic version of a stingray that's powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells. The work demonstrates a new method for building bio-inspired robots with tissue engineering technology.

Scientists have created a bio-robotic mimic of a stingray powered and guided by light-sensitive rat heart cells.

The work, published in the journal, Science, demonstrates a new method for building bio-inspired robots using tissue engineering. Batoid fish, which include stingrays, are by their flat bodies and long, wing-like fins that extend from their heads. These fins move in energy-efficient waves that emulate from the front of the fin to the back, allowing batoids to glide gracefully through water. Inspired by this design, Sung-Jin Park and fellow researchers endeavored to build a miniature, soft tissue robot with similar qualities and efficiency.

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"I want to build an artificial heart, but you're not going to go from zero to a whole heart overnight," says Kit Parker, a bioengineer and physicist at Harvard University's Wyss Institute. "This is a training exercise."

They created neutrally charged gold skeletons that mimic the stingray's shape, which were overlaid with a thin layer of stretchy polymer. Along the top of the robotic ray, the researchers strategically aligned rat cardiomyocytes, heart muscle cells. The cardiomyocytes, when stimulated, contract the fins downward.

Since stimulating the fins to turn in an upward motion would require a second layer of cardiomyocytes, the researchers instead designed the gold skeleton in a shape that stores some downward energy, which is later released as the cells relax, allowing the fins to rise. So that the researchers can control the robot's movement using pulses of light, the cardiomyoctyes were genetically engineered to respond to light cues.

Asymmetrical pulses of light can be used to turn the robot to the left or right, the researchers showed, and different frequencies of light can be used to control its speed, as demonstrated in a series of videos.

"We want to make sure we think about the ethical issues hand in hand with just asking what we can do"

"You have one group standing up and then the next and then the next. Well, in the case of the muscle here, they're doing the same thing,"says John Dabiri, a professor of engineering at Stanford who worked with Parker on the artificial jellyfish. "They're able to get a certain section of muscle to contract and then the next and then the next."

The method works well enough to guide the bio-robot through a basic obstacle course. The robotic stingray, containing roughly 200,000 cardiomyocytes, is 16 millimeters long and weighs just 10 grams.

The artificial ray isn't really an organism. It can't grow, adapt or reproduce. But scientists should be considering the possibilities as they pursue other projects like this, the researchers say.

"We want to make sure we think about the ethical issues hand in hand with just asking what we can do," Dabiri says.

SOURCE  NPR

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 Biology  

Researchers have made progress towards the possibility of creating synthetic life with the development of a form of artificial evolution in a simple chemistry set at the University of Glasgow.

Scientists have taken an important step towards the possibility of creating synthetic life with the development of a form of artificial evolution in a simple chemistry set without DNA.

A team from the University of Glasgow’s School of Chemistry report in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications on how they have managed to create an evolving chemical system for the first time. The process uses a robotic ‘aid’ and could be used in the future to ‘evolve’ new chemicals capable of performing specific tasks.

"This is the first time that an evolvable chemical system has existed outside of biology. Biological evolution has given rise to enormously complex and sophisticated forms of life, and our robot-driven form of evolution could have the potential to do something similar for chemical systems."

The project is the latest of the Cronin Group’s efforts to explore evolution outside organic biology. Other projects have included the development of inorganic chemical cells known as iCHELLs, which are built from molecules of metal and exhibit some of the same abilities as living cells.

The researchers used a specially-designed open source robot based upon a cheap 3D printer to create and monitor droplets of oil in water-filled Petri dishes in their lab. Each droplet was composed from a slightly different mixture of four chemical compounds.

Droplets of oil move in water like primitive chemical machines, transferring chemical energy to kinetic energy. The researchers’ robot used a video camera to monitor, process and analyse the behaviour of 225 differently-composed droplets, identifying a number of distinct characteristics such as vibration or clustering.

The research team was led by Professor Lee Cronin, the University of Glasgow’s Regius Chair of Chemistry.

The team picked out three types of droplet behavior – division, movement and vibration – to focus on in the next stage of the research. They used the robot to deposit populations of droplets of the same composition, then ranked these populations in order of how closely they fit the criteria of behavior identified by the researchers. The chemical composition of the ‘fittest’ population was then carried over into a second generation of droplets, and the process of robotic selection was begun again.

Over the course of 20 repetitions of the process, the researchers found that the droplets became more stable, mimicking the natural selection of evolution.

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Professor Cronin said: “This is the first time that an evolvable chemical system has existed outside of biology. Biological evolution has given rise to enormously complex and sophisticated forms of life, and our robot-driven form of evolution could have the potential to do something similar for chemical systems.

“This initial phase of research has shown that the system we’ve designed is capable of facilitating an evolutionary process, so we could in the future create models to perform specific tasks, such as splitting, then seeking out other droplets and fusing with them. We’re also keen to explore in future experiments how the emergence of unexpected features, functions and behaviors might be selected for.

“In recent years, we’ve learned a great deal about the process of biological evolution through computer simulations. However, this research provides the possibility of new ways of looking at the origins of life as well as creating new simple chemical life forms.”

Below is a TED Talk Cronin presented a few years ago on, "Making Matter Come Alive."




SOURCE  University of Glasgow

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 Organic Chemistry  

For the first time, chemists have successfully produced an artificial cell containing organelles capable of carrying out the various steps of a chemical reaction. This was done at the Institute for Molecules and Materials at Radboud University Nijmegen.

It is difficult for chemists to match the chemistry in living cells in their laboratories. After all, in cells all kinds of complex reactions are taking place simultaneously in a small area, in various compartments and incredibly efficiently. This is why chemists attempt to imitate the cell in various ways. In doing so, they also hope to learn more about the origin of life and the transition from chemistry to biology.

Now, a research team led by Jan van Hest from Radboud University Nijmegen and Sébastien Lecommandoux at the University of Bordeaux have created artificial organelles by filling tiny spheres with chemicals and placing these inside a water droplet.

The research has been published in Nature Chemistry and Angewandte Chemie.

The researchers then coated the water droplet with a polymer layer to make a cell wall. Using fluorescence, they were able to show that the planned cascade of reactions did in fact take place. This means that they are the first chemists to create a polymer cell with working organelles.

"Just like in the cells in our bodies, the chemicals are able to enter the cell plasma following the reaction in the organelles, to be processed elsewhere in the cell," Ruud Peters, PhD candidate on the project, explains.

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Creating cell-like structures is currently very popular in the field of chemistry, with various methods being tried at the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM). Professor Wilhelm Huck, for example, is making cells from tiny droplets of solutions very similar to cytoplasm, and Van Hest’s group is building cells using polymers.

"Competing groups are working closer to biology; making cells from fatty acids, for example. We would like to do the same in the future. Another step would be to make cells that produce their own energy supply. We are also working on ways of controlling the movement of chemicals within the cell, towards organelles," says Huck. "By simulating these things, we are able to better understand living cells. One day we will even be able to make something that looks very much like the real thing."



SOURCE  Radboud University Nijmegen

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 Artificial Life  

The Open Worm project aims to build a lifelike copy of a nematode roundworm entirely out of computer code. Now the creature's creators have added code that gets the virtual worm wriggling like the real thing.

The open-source OpenWorm Project has had a major milestone,creatingt an artificial life form from the cellular level in silco.

"That's a simulated worm body with muscle segments that resemble an actual C.Elegans," project advocate John Hurliman told New World Notes.

"Each muscle segment can receive a contraction signal, and although the current setup just has a hardcoded algorithm driving the muscles, its movement closely resembles published literature on how C. Elegans swims."

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"The core algorithm for the physics simulation is called PCI-SPH, which is a somewhat advanced but well understood particle simulation method. The main source of complexity is the architecture: going from brain firing signals to muscle contractions to moving particles around."

The Open Worm project started in May 2013 and is slowly working towards creating a virtual copy of the C. elegans nematode. This worm is one of the most widely studied creatures on Earth and was the first multicelled organism to have its entire genome mapped.

The simulated worm slowly being built out of code aims to replicate C. elegans in exquisite detail with each of its 1,000 cells being modelled on computer.

The next steps for OpenWorm are to continue working on performance and hook up a synthetic brain, based on the worm's connectome.

Early work on the worm involved making a few muscle segments twitch but now the team has a complete worm to work with. The code governing how the creature's muscles move has been refined so its swaying motion and speed matches that of its real life counterpart. The tiny C. elegans manages to move around in water at a rate of about 1mm per second.


SOURCE  New World Notes

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