Xenobots are Artificially Designed Reproducing Robots Made of Living Cells

Yup, for real.

Hiya!

The world is changing fast — socially, environmentally, scientifically, and technologically. It also seems like more categories are increasingly blending. Such as the organoid intelligence (OI) I told you about on Friday, which blends biology and technology.

But you’d be mistaken if you thought OI was the only future of this new technology. In addition to OI, or I suppose another branch of it, is Xenobots. While OI blends living brain cells with artificial intelligence to create biocomputers, xenobots are artificially designed robots made entirely of living cells.

What’s A Xenobot?

The fields of biology and engineering have increasingly overlapped over the past few decades. Initially, the idea behind blending the two was advancing medicine by finding ways to engineer replacement tissue for medical applications. As the years progressed, though, scientists became excited about the possibility of creating organisms that don’t already exist in the natural world.

Enter Xenobots, which are made of actual living tissue, but algorithms design them on a supercomputer. That’s right, a supercomputer uses an algorithm to create various xenobot blueprints, and then scientists use pick through them and use the instructions to produce living robots made of organic living cells — not plastic, metal, or any other synthetic materials.

Think of books, as in actual turn-the-page books, which are made of paper from trees. But you wouldn’t say a book is a tree. Similarly, xenobots are made of living cells, but they’ve been repurposed to serve a different task.

The name, Xenobot, comes from earlier techniques using frog cells — which I’ll tell you more about in a minute — specifically, cells from the African clawed frog (Xenopus Laevis), which is where the “xeno” in Xenobots comes from. Then, bot means robot, which is appropriate since Xenobots are basically biological robots.