The Biological Microbot that will Save Lives in the Near Future
Will you be taking xenobots instead of medicine any time soon? A recent development in systems biology combines biology and computer science in a way never seen before, by letting AI methods model a miniscule robot made out of frog tissue. This may all sound a little bizarre, so let’s clear it up. Sam Kriegman and his team in Vermont followed the trend of solving complex problems by feeding them to AI. While AI has become jargon everyone is familiar with, not everybody knows how it works. What this research group essentially did was to let the AI automatically design various potential lifeforms, with a specific function in mind. When they had the blueprint, the next step was to try to recreate the lifeform in a lab. The cells they used to make the robot are embryonic stem cells harvested from an animal named Xenopus Laevis, hence the name xenobots. This Xenopus is a widely used model organism so there is a lot of information out there already about the location of