The American scientists who created the first living robots say that life forms known as xenobots can now reproduce in a way unknown to plants and animals. Formed from the stem cells of the African claw frog (Xenopus laevis) after which they are named, xenobots are less than one millimeter, he said. CNN.

These beads were first introduced in 2020, after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and heal themselves. Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and the Harvard University Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have announced that they have discovered a whole new form of biological reproduction, different from any animal or plant known to science.

"I was surprised by that. "Frogs have their own way of reproducing, but when you separate the cells from the rest of the embryo and give them a chance to understand how to survive in a new environment, they will not only find a new way to move, but also a new way to reproduce." , said Michael Levine, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Detection Center at Tufts University, who led the new research.

Stem cells are non-specialized cells that can grow into different cell types. To make xenobots, the researchers scraped the living stem cells from the frog's embryos and left them to incubate. There was no gene manipulation.

"Most people think that robots are made of metal and ceramics, but it does not matter what the robot is made of, but what it does, or whether it works for the benefit of humans. "In that sense, it's a robot, but apparently the organism was created genetically, from unmodified frog cells." says Josh Bongard, a professor of computer science and robotics at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study.

Bongard said they had discovered that xenobots, which were originally spherical in shape and made up of about 3.000 cells, could replicate. But this happened rarely and only under certain circumstances. Xenobots used "kinetic replication," a process known to occur at the molecular level but never before observed at the level of whole cells or organisms.

Using artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make xenobots more efficient in this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembles Pac-Man, a video game from the 80's. They discovered that he was able to find small stem cells in the petri dish, and a few days later the cell set became a new xenobot.

"Artificial intelligence did not program these machines the way we normally imagine them, writing a coded process." Bongard told CNN.

Xenobots are a very early technology, something like the first computers of the 1940s, and still have no practical application. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a range of tasks in the body and environment, the researchers say. These may include collecting microplastics in the oceans, checking the root system, and regenerative medicine.

Although the possibility of self-replication in biotechnology may be worrisome, the researchers stressed that living machines are completely confined to the laboratory and are easily shut down because they are biodegradable and regulated by ethics experts. The research is partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a U.S. agency that oversees the development of technology for military use.

"There are many things that are possible if we use this type of plasticity and the ability of cells to solve problems." concluded Bongard. The study was published Monday in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PNAS.