Xenobots!

From the biophysics/collective phenomena desk: xenobots! This translates to - apparently - "weird hopping things".

Multicellular life makes use of specialized cells, and those specialized cells materialize in a mostly predictable pattern than - on average - results in the organisms that biologists classify and study. But what happens when that process is disrupted?

Philip Ball’s recent piece in Quanta recounts a series of experiments on differentiated frog cells. Skin cells specifically, were isolated and left to fend for themselves. Those eventually clustered, but the collective behavior of the resulting blobs of cells was really surprising. Surprises like their ability to respond to their environment and repurpose cilia for locomotion.

As pointed out in the piece - the experiment was a simple one, perhaps long over due. It’s been long known that heart cells - when grown in the lab - collectively generate a voltage drop and begin beating rhythmically on their own. But these new experiments highlight the important of collective cellular action - and how flexible it can be. They put a new epistemological layer between the cell and the organism, and the questions - both scientific and philosophic - will only get more challenging from here.

If you haven’t seen Doug Blackiston’s research website on xenobots, you should.