Art and technology often draw inspiration from nature - it's how you get cool robots that run like cheetahs, for example. Recently, researchers from the University of Illinois took a page out of that book on a tiny scale, creating mini bio-bots that could one day swim through your bloodstream, intelligently delivering medicine right where you need it.
The miniscule swimming bio-bots - the first class of synthetic structures that can travel through viscous biological fluids by self-propulsion, according to RedOrbit - were detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Communications this week. The miniature robots use long tails modeled on the flagella of microorganisms to propel the sperm-like robots through thick, viscous fluids, like the kind you would find inside the human body.
The design is simple and ingenious, and requires a "minimal amount of engineering - just a head and a wire," according to Taher Saif, the University of Illinois professor of mechanical science and engineering who lead the research project. "Micro-organisms have a whole world that we only glimpse through the microscope," said Saif. "This is the first time that an engineered system has reached this underworld."
The way the flagellum is powered isn't quite as simple or direct as putting a wire on a tiny robot head though. According to the research paper, the body of the bio-bot is made of a flexible polymer that is propelled by heart cells that were cultured near the connection between the head and the tail. Those heart cells self-organize and begin to beat together, sending a wave down the tail which propels the whole bio-bot forward in a fluid.
The researchers don't fully understand how the cells self-organize and communicate with each other to beat in a synchronized fashion, calling it "a remarkable emergent phenomenon," but they do know that the heart cells have to beat together in a certain way to get the tail to move. Saif and his colleagues have also built a two-tailed bio-bot that can swim even faster, given the right heart cell beating pattern.
Right now, the University of Illinois researchers have made an incredible step by creating bio-bots that can propel themselves. But Saif sees even more capabilities for the miniature robots in the future, because if a mini robot can move itself, it could also theoretically be capable of navigating its way through the body.
Saif thinks bio-bots could, in the future, be engineered to sense chemicals and light, or be programmed to travel to a specific location. "The long-term vision is simple," said Saif. "Could we make elementary structures and seed them with stem cells that would differentiate into smart structures to deliver drugs, perform minimally invasive surgery or target cancer?"
Self-propelled cancer-killing nanobots surely does sound like a fantastical future, but then again, so does a microscopic synthetic sperm robot powered by synchronized heart cells.
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