[Scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts and Harvard said
they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction
different from any animal or plant known to science.]
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WORLD'S FIRST LIVING ROBOTS CAN NOW REPRODUCE, SCIENTISTS SAY  
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Katie Hunt
November 29, 2021
CNN
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_ Scientists from the University of Vermont, Tufts and Harvard said
they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction
different from any animal or plant known to science. _

An AI-designed “parent” organism (C shape; red) beside stem cells
that have been compressed into a ball (“offspring”; green),
Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman

 

(CNN)The US scientists who created the first living robots
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the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way
not seen in plants and animals.

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis)
from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter
(0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after
experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and
self-heal.

Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont,
Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for
Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an
entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal
or plant known to science.

"I was astounded by it," said Michael Levin, a professor of biology
and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was
co-lead author of the new research.

"Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use but when you
... liberate (the cells) from the rest of the embryo and you give them
a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do
they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently
a new way to reproduce."

The C-shaped parent xenobots collect and compress loose stem cells
together into piles which can mature into offspring.

Robot or organism?

Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have the ability to develop
into different cell types. To make the xenobots, the researchers
scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and left them to incubate.
There's no manipulation of genes involved.

"Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's
not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act
on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer
science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and
lead author of the study.

"In that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from
genetically unmodified frog cell."

Bongard said they found that the xenobots, which were initially
sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But
it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots
used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the
molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of
whole cells or organisms, Bongard said.

With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested
billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this
type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that
resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to
find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside
its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new
xenobots.

The parent rotates a large ball of stem cells that is maturing into a
new xenobot.

"The AI didn't program these machines in the way we usually think
about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this
Pac-Man shape," Bongard said.

"The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the
xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process."

The xenobots are very early technology -- think of a 1940s computer --
and don't yet have any practical applications. However, this
combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could
potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and the
environment, according to the researchers. This may include things
like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems
and regenerative medicine.

While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology could spark
concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely
contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable
and regulated by ethics experts.

The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, a federal agency that oversees the development of
technology for military use.

"There are many things that are possible if we take advantage of this
kind of plasticity and ability of cells to solve problems," Bongard
said.

The study [[link removed]] was
published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PNAS on Monday.

_Katie Hunt is Senior Producer, CNN Digital. Snewrites about science
and health for CNN Digital based in London. She was previously a
senior digital producer in Hong Kong, where she led coverage of
China._

_Jessie Yeung in Hong Kong contributed to this report_

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