By layering rat heart cells over a gold skeleton, scientists managed to build a tiny swimming artificial stingrays that can be driven and guided by light.
These little ray-bots may offer insights into building soft robotics, studying the human heart -- and perhaps building an artificial one from scratch.
Senior author Kit Parker of Harvard bioengineering, first got the idea when his daughter tried to pet a stingray at an aquarium and it quickly and gracefully evaded her hand. The rippling body reminded him of the stringy cord-like trebeculated muscle on the endocardial surface of the heart.
Parker wanted to understand how the heart works, which is essentially just a muscular pump to flush fluid around the inside of the body. Animals such as stingray or the skate, which have soft bodies that move by generating waves of motion down their bodies, are doing a very similar thing. Though, these guys are acting on fluids outside the body.
Parker had teamed up with the "genius" John Dabiri before to build a synthetic jellyfish out of rat heart cells, which easily propelled itself around a tank. However, unlike the stingray, jellyfish couldn't move with an real direction.
Parker and his colleagues used rad heart cells since they're much stronger than human cardiac system. They genetically engineered the rat heart cells to respond to light. They then sandwich the layer together with silicone layers and tiny skeleton made of gold. Gold is relatively easy to sputter onto the silicone rubber and partly because it's chemically inter and less likely to damage the living cells.
As a result, a tiny soft robot around the size of a penny, about tenth of the size of a little skate, which can fit in the palm of your hand.
When the scientists put the critter in a salt solution and shone a blue light on it, the heart cells would contract and the ray-bot would swim forward. The ray-bot can also turn left or right, depending on the light's direction.
Parker and his colleagues are already taking lessons from this experiment and applying them to other studies about the heart. He thinks that insight here could be used to make optical pacemakers, instead of electric-based ones.
Source: Los Angeles Times
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