Caltech creates artificial jellyfish from living tissue
Baku, July 30 (AZERTAC). It's not really a jellyfish, but it's close enough.
Caltech and Harvard researchers have bioengineered an artificial jellyfish, using silicon and tissue from a rat heart, in a scientific breakthrough that could eventually lead to the duplication of living heart tissue in humans, possibly replacing pacemakers.
The team published its results Sunday in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Dubbed medusoid after the mythological Medusa, the artificial jellyfish isn't quite a living organism, only muscle cells layered onto a silicon polymer and zapped into life-like behavior by an electric volt.
It swims, mimicking the simple pumping muscle of a real jellyfish, but looks very different with a flat, star-like design.
It doesn't breed or feed, though the medusoids did exhibit feeding behavior in its swimming patterns.
Janna Nawroth, a Caltech doctoral student who served as the study's lead author, calls it a pseudo organism.
"While it does not have a mind on its own, it responds to stimuli (such as the voltage pulse) like an organism does, just with a - at this point - very restricted repertoire of behaviors (i.e. contraction or not)," she said in an email.
The jellyfish also shows limited capacity for self-repair and self-growth, Nawroth said, so it's much more than a robotic structure.
Without any surrounding tissue to stimulate it, however, the medusoid lifespan is only around two weeks.
Creating jellyfish with extended lifespans will be the next step, with the idea that it could be the basis for creating artificial human heart valves using living tissue, possibly through stem cells.
"We're reimagining how much we can do in terms of synthetic biology," said John Dabiri, who directs Caltech's Biological Propulsion Laboratory. "A lot of work these days is done to engineer molecules, but there is much less effort to engineer organisms. I think this is a good glimpse into the future of re-engineering entire organisms for the purposes of advancing biomedical technology."
Dabiri's lab has researched jellyfish for several years, turning to them because their simple structures can yield plenty of useful information about the mechanics of biology.
Connecting jellyfish to the functions of the human heart was the idea of Kevin Kit Parker, a Harvard bioengineering professor.
Nawroth expects to continue experimenting with the medusoid design.
"We have not found any designs yet that appear better than the real jellyfish in their natural environment," she said, "but we'll keep looking and explore additional design parameters such as lobe number and contraction frequency."
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