{"id":3407,"date":"2021-12-15T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=3407"},"modified":"2022-01-14T03:25:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T03:25:02","slug":"novel-artificial-xenobots-replicate-in-a-never-before-seen-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/novel-artificial-xenobots-replicate-in-a-never-before-seen-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Novel Artificial \u201cXenobots\u201d Replicate In a Never-Before-Seen Way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some of you may be old enough to remember Pac-Man<\/em>, which was a famous arcade game that featured the tiny, yellow titular character that gobbled up ghosts whenever they snacked on some cherries or other fruits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, imagine if Pac-Man was made of living frog cells, and managed to get himself some children and grandchildren through a pretty radical way of cell reproduction. That\u2019s precisely what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em><\/a> claimed to have just done\u2014down to even the video game character\u2019s shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The novel research of Kriegman and team bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous \u201880s arcade video game character. (Kriegman et al, 2021) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The effort was spearheaded by Sam Kriegman, from Harvard University\u2019s Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering (WIBE). Together with a team from Harvard, the University of Vermont (UVM), and Tufts University (TU), Kriegman crafted artificial \u201cXenobots<\/em>\u201d from cells harvested from the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis<\/em>)\u2014and they did it with the help of supercomputers and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These \u201cXenobots\u201d actually made headlines last year for being the \u201cfirst living robots,\u201d with the authors referring to them as \u201cliving, programmable [organisms.]\u201d The previous study was also published in the same journal as this one<\/a>, just nearly two years prior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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