Xenobots: Living Robots Named After African Clawed Frog Reproduce in New Biological Form

Scientists behind the first-ever living robot from the stem cells of African clawed Frogs, Xenobots, have reproduced in a new way unlike what's seen in animals and plants.

Plant vs. Animal Reproduction

There are two types of reproduction in plants: asexual and sexual. Sexual reproduction, according to ScienceABC, is similar to how humans and many animals reproduce. Male pollen and female ovarian germ cells merge with plants into new organisms that inherit gene traits from both phenotypes. In plants, the sexually reproductive parts are its flowers.

Asexual reproduction, on the other hand, involves vegetative reproduction through roots, leaves, and stems. Essentially, parent plants regenerate by utilizing one of the parts stated. Both sexual and asexual reproduction, be it on animals or plants, have their own sets of advantages. In sexual reproduction, newly formed plants have a combination of genes that allows them to adapt to changing environments quickly.

Xenobots Reproducing: Organism or Robot

The Xenobots, less than 0.04 inches wide, are tiny blobs that first debuted in 2020 after scientists created an experiment that showed that the robots created from African clawed frog stem cells could move, self-heal, and work in groups. Today, the scientists behind the breakthrough discovery have discovered a new form of biological reproduction in the Xenobots, unlike what's seen on plants or animals.

Michael Levin, co-lead author and a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, explains that the team was astounded by their discovery. He adds that frogs usually reproduce; however, when cells are liberated from the rest of the embryo, they are given a chance to figure out new biological processes in a new environment. Not only did these stem cell robots figure out new ways to move, but they've also figured out how to reproduce, reports CNN.

Stem cells have been in the buzz for decades now; unspecialized cells can develop into different cell types. To make the first-ever living robots, Xenobots, researchers have to scrape living stem cells from frog embryos and allow them to incubate. No gene manipulation was involved in a study published in PNAS, titled "Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms."

Josh Bongard, the lead author of the study, explains that people often think that robots are constructed from metals and ceramics. But the Xenobot is an organism made with genetically unmodified frog cells. It's a robot simply because it's meant to replicate people's actions and processes.

He adds that initially, the Xenobots were spherical and made from roughly 3,000 cells that could replicate. However, it rarely happens. The robots used kinetic replication, a process known to occur only at the molecular level but have never been observed at the scale of whole cells or organisms.

As of now, the xenobots are at their early stages and don't have any practical applications yet. On the other hand, the combination of molecular biology and AI could play host for bodies of tasks in new environments, according to the researchers.

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