Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms

Abstract

All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.

Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments

“…Creative problem solving (e.g., the reuse of existing affordances in new ways) is revealed most strongly when living systems are pushed well beyond their default configurations by techniques such as chimerism and bioengineering. Skin cells removed from a frog embryo can reboot their multicellularity in a new environment, forming self-motile novel proto-organisms (Xenobots) with numerous capacities, including kinematic self-replication [ 25 , 123 , 124 ]. These cells reuse the hardware provided by their wild-type frog genome in new ways for coherent morphogenesis, regeneration, and behavior.…”

Minimal Developmental Computation: A Causal Network Approach to Understand Morphogenetic Pattern Formation

“…This unexpected, emergent feature of this system mimics an interesting and important aspect of biology—plasticity. Numerous examples (for example, as reviewed in [ 13 ]) exist of robust, coherent organisms forming from the same genome despite drastic changes in the number, size, or type of cells [ 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 ]. The question of how certain types of search and encodings produce specifications of machinery with the ability to handle novel circumstances remains an open and important field of inquiry [ 80 , 81 , 82 ].…”

Exploring standards for multicellular mammalian synthetic biology

“…For the scope of this opinion, we will examine categories (i) and (ii) which deal with genetic-cellular bioengineering where biological standards are most relevant, rather than group (iii) which is rooted in physical and chemical engineering. Biological standards might become important as the field advances and groups begin to overlap, as in the case of bioinspired soft robotics or biohybrid tissue constructs, where embryonic cells and cardiomyocytes amenable to genetic engineering are combined with biomaterial scaffolds to create multicellular systems possessing autonomous or optogenetically controlled aquatic locomotion [24][25][26][27][28]. System: a set of logically interconnected parts that form a unified whole with logical and potentially emergent properties.…”