Biotech¶
biotechnology: the exploitation of biological processes for industrial and other purposes, especially the genetic manipulation of microorganisms for the production of antibiotics, hormones, etc.
bioremediation: the use of either naturally occurring or deliberately introduced microorganisms or other forms of life to consume and break down environmental pollutants, in order to clean up a polluted site.
Grist¶
Bioremediation¶
Sunflowers used to clean up radiation
Bioremediation of PetroleumMA RTIN MARIETTA Contaminated Soil on Kwajalein Island
These bacteria clean up radioactive waste
Bioremediation of metals and radionuclides
Microorganisms In Toxic Groundwater Fine-Tuned To Survive
Cyanobacteria¶
Can be used to produce mindbogglingly valuable compounds.
Cyanobacteria
Bioactive compounds produced by cyanobacteria
Engineering¶
CRISPR
Xenobots¶
Named xenobots after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which they take their stem cells, the machines are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide – small enough to travel inside human bodies. They can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, and work together in groups.
The researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos, and left them to incubate. Then, the cells were cut and reshaped into specific “body forms” designed by a supercomputer – forms “never seen in nature,”
The cells then began to work on their own – skin cells bonded to form structure, while pulsing heart muscle cells allowed the robot to move on its own. Xenobots even have self-healing capabilities; when the scientists sliced into one robot, it healed by itself and kept moving.
“They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”
Xenobots could be used to clean up radioactive waste, collect microplastics in the oceans, carry medicine inside human bodies, or even travel into our arteries to scrape out plaque. The xenobots can survive in aqueous environments without additional nutrients for days or weeks
“If we could make 3D biological form on demand, we could repair birth defects, reprogram tumors into normal tissue, regenerate after traumatic injury or degenerative disease, and defeat aging,”
The organisms come pre-loaded with their own food source of lipid and protein deposits, allowing them to live for a little over a week – but they can’t reproduce or evolve. However, their lifespan can increase to several weeks in nutrient-rich environments
And although the supercomputer – a powerful piece of artificial intelligence – plays a big role in building these robots, it’s “unlikely” that the AI could have evil intentions.
“The AI didn’t program these machines in the way we usually think about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape,” Bongard said.
“The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process.”
Meet the xenobot: world’s first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells
World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say
A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms