The world’s first “live robots” learned to reproduce (vid)

Robot or organism? The xenobots developed by American scientists last year are neither. They are considered a new form of life, the first “living robots”, organisms that can be programmed. Now, the same scientists have announced that xenobots can now reproduce in a different way from plants and animals.

Xenobots are derived from the stem cells of the African frog Xenopus laevis and are less than one millimeter in size. They can move, collaborate in groups and heal themselves.

Now, scientists from the University of Vermont and Harvard have discovered a completely new form of biological reproduction that was not previously known to science.

We were surprised. Frogs have a way of reproducing which they use but when you release the cells from the rest of the embryo and give them the opportunity to understand how to survive in a new environment, they not only understand how to move but also find a new way of reproducing.

The team found that xenobots, which were originally spherical in shape and consisted of 3,000 cells, could reproduce, but this rarely happened. They used “kinetic replication”, which takes place at the molecular level but has never been observed at the scale of cells or organisms.

With the help of artificial intelligence, researchers have tested billions of different shapes to make xenobots more capable of reproduction. They came up with a C-shape reminiscent of Pac-Man, with which the xenobot could collect tiny stem cells with its “mouth” and over days this concentration became new xenobots.

While the prospect of self-reproducing biotechnology may be of concern to many, scientists believe that in the future they could be used in a variety of fields, such as marine microplastics and pharmaceuticals.

The research was published in PNAS.

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