How Xenobot Form Into Living Organisms on their own.

Cells Form Into Living ‘Xenobots’ on Their Own

Embryonic cells can self-assemble into new forms that don’t resemble the bodies they usually generate, challenging old ideas of what defines an organism.

Xenobots — mobile, self-organized clusters of embryonic frog cells created by researchers — swarm in a culture dish much like conventional organisms do. They seem to respond to their environment and to one another.

VIDEO: QUANTA MAGAZINE; DOUGLAS BLACKISTON

Early last year, the biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues offered a glimpse of how versatile living matter can be. Levin and Douglas Blackiston, a member of his laboratory at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University, brought together nascent skin and muscle cells from a frog embryo and shaped the multicelled assemblies by hand. This sculpting process was guided by an algorithm developed by the computer scientists Josh Bongard and Sam Kriegman of the University of Vermont, which searched for simulated arrangements of the two cell types capable of organized movement. One design, for example, had two twitching leglike stumps on the bottom for pushing itself along.

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