Motile Living Biobots Self‐Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells

Abstract

Fundamental knowledge gaps exist about the plasticity of cells from adult soma and the potential diversity of body shape and behavior in living constructs derived from genetically wild‐type cells. Here anthrobots are introduced, a spheroid‐shaped multicellular biological robot (biobot) platform with diameters ranging from 30 to 500 microns and cilia‐powered locomotive abilities. Each Anthrobot begins as a single cell, derived from the adult human lung, and self‐constructs into a multicellular motile biobot after being cultured in extra cellular matrix for 2 weeks and transferred into a minimally viscous habitat. Anthrobots exhibit diverse behaviors with motility patterns ranging from tight loops to straight lines and speeds ranging from 5–50 microns s−1. The anatomical investigations reveal that this behavioral diversity is significantly correlated with their morphological diversity. Anthrobots can assume morphologies with fully polarized or wholly ciliated bodies and spherical or ellipsoidal shapes, each related to a distinct movement type. Anthrobots are found to be capable of traversing, and inducing rapid repair of scratches in, cultured human neural cell sheets in vitro. By controlling microenvironmental cues in bulk, novel structures, with new and unexpected behavior and biomedically‐relevant capabilities, can be discovered in morphogenetic processes without direct genetic editing or manual sculpting.

Classical Sorting Algorithms as a Model of Morphogenesis: self-sorting arrays reveal unexpected competencies in a minimal model of basal intelligence

“…Existing real-world biological examples of releasing sub-agents from explicit control, to ask what they would do if allowed, include the engineering of biobots. It has recently been shown that un-modified, genetically-normal cells self-assemble into constructs with novel behaviors when freed from the instructive influence of their neighbors (Blackiston et al, 2023;Gumuskaya et al, 2023), revealing baseline competencies not apparent from their standard role within default developmental algorithms. The minimal model shown here represents a first step toward the development of more general strategies to study emergent goals in collective systems and ways in which those goals cooperate with, compete with, and alter the performance of explicit goals we (or evolution) instantiate via hardware or software mechanisms.…”

“…Here, in keeping with an emphasis on basal (minimal) cognition, "goal" is used not to refer to a high-order, metacognitive "known purpose" as seen in human behavior, but rather in its minimal cybernetic (Rosenblueth et al, 1943) definition of a target state that a system has some ability to reach, despite a range of challenges. Learning to predict and control the goals of collective systems-especially newly engineered systems-is likely to be of existential importance to human flourishing over the coming decades in areas ranging from swarm robotics to AI systems to bioengineered tissues (Ebrahimkhani & Levin, 2021;Gumuskaya et al, 2023).…”

Self-improvising Memory: a perspective on memories as agential, dynamically-reinterpreting cognitive glue

“…It cannot take for granted how much genetic material it will have [117], how many cells [120][121][122], or what size cells [116], it will have (in addition to any external damage it might sustain, or the chemical details of its environment -even the internal parts cannot be assumed to be the same as those with which its past genome was forged) 38 . Beyond the incredible robustness of standard form and function, we see adaptation to extreme changes of conditions, with no need for transgenes or genomic editing, in the spontaneous emergence of Xenobots [123][124][125], Anthrobots [126], and plant galls [127] (constructions of leaf cells hacked by signals from a non-human bioengineer to produce a totally new and complex pattern, Figure 5). This is also probably why chimerism and bioengineering, at all scales, workscoherent outcomes often result from combining not only divergent living components from different lineages [128] but also totally un-natural and novel engineered components, from nanomaterials to smart implants [129][130][131][132][133][134] (Figure 6).…”

Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue

“…It cannot take for granted how much genetic material it will have [143], or how many cells [146][147][148], or what size cells [142], it will have (in addition to any external damage it might sustain, or the chemical details of its environment-even the internal parts cannot be assumed to be the same as those with which its past genome was forged). Beyond the incredible robustness of standard form and function, we see adaptation to extreme changes of conditions, with no need for transgenes or genomic editing, in the spontaneous emergence of Xenobots [149][150][151], Anthrobots [152], and plant galls [153] (constructions of leaf cells hacked by signals from a non-human bioengineer to produce a totally new and complex pattern, as shown in Figure 5). This is also probably why chimerism and bioengineering, at all scales, work-coherent outcomes often result from combining not only divergent living components from different lineages [154] but also totally unnatural and novel engineered components, from nanomaterials to smart implants [155][156][157][158][159][160] (Figure 6).…”