Health & Medicine
Robotic Stingray Discovered, May Lead To Development Of Better Artificial Heart
Elaine Hannah
First Posted: Jul 08, 2016 05:55 AM EDT
The scientists developed a tiny robotic stingray about the size of a toenail that is driven by living muscle cells and controlled by pulses of light. This may lead to a building of better artificial heart.
The findings of the development were published in the journal Science on Thursday. The study was led by Kevin Kit Parker, an applied physicist at Harvard University and other researchers.
According to Huffington Post, the robotic stingray is made of a mixture of living rat heart cells and artificial material. It is about 16 millimeters long and weighs just 10 grams. It moves just like stingray as it flaps its fins in a wave-like motion in the water. Its movement of the fins is operated by light pulses, which are delivered to the heart muscles that line the surface of the fins.
Parker stated that the stingray robot could interest scientist in a variety of fields. These include cardiac physiologists, who are interested in how the muscular architecture of the heart creates its unique pumping function and the robotics engineer, who are looking to use cells as a living engineering material.
According to the Guardian, Parker was inspired to create a robotic stingray when he went to the New England Aquarium together with his daughter, Caroline. Her daughter was trying to pet the stingray and it quickly moved away from her hand in a very elegant way. This struck him like a thunderbolt. He then realized that he could build a system with musculature same to cell layers of the heart.
Parker and his team developed the robot stingray made of a gold skeleton, which is covered with a thin layer of flexible polymer. The brain and muscle of the ray are made of approximately 200,000 heart muscle cells, which are grown from a rat embryo and put on top of the robot.
The scientists used the optogenetics to control the cells. This is a method that issued in neuroscience to switch on and off with light. The cells are also upgraded with a chunk of DNA with optogenetics. Parker has linked the pumping and moving fluids in marine life forms with the heart and other aspects of the anatomy. He stated that the idea of this study is to get a better insight into the human heart and heart disease by reverse engineering other forms of muscular pumps that could be seen in nature.
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First Posted: Jul 08, 2016 05:55 AM EDT
The scientists developed a tiny robotic stingray about the size of a toenail that is driven by living muscle cells and controlled by pulses of light. This may lead to a building of better artificial heart.
The findings of the development were published in the journal Science on Thursday. The study was led by Kevin Kit Parker, an applied physicist at Harvard University and other researchers.
According to Huffington Post, the robotic stingray is made of a mixture of living rat heart cells and artificial material. It is about 16 millimeters long and weighs just 10 grams. It moves just like stingray as it flaps its fins in a wave-like motion in the water. Its movement of the fins is operated by light pulses, which are delivered to the heart muscles that line the surface of the fins.
Parker stated that the stingray robot could interest scientist in a variety of fields. These include cardiac physiologists, who are interested in how the muscular architecture of the heart creates its unique pumping function and the robotics engineer, who are looking to use cells as a living engineering material.
According to the Guardian, Parker was inspired to create a robotic stingray when he went to the New England Aquarium together with his daughter, Caroline. Her daughter was trying to pet the stingray and it quickly moved away from her hand in a very elegant way. This struck him like a thunderbolt. He then realized that he could build a system with musculature same to cell layers of the heart.
Parker and his team developed the robot stingray made of a gold skeleton, which is covered with a thin layer of flexible polymer. The brain and muscle of the ray are made of approximately 200,000 heart muscle cells, which are grown from a rat embryo and put on top of the robot.
The scientists used the optogenetics to control the cells. This is a method that issued in neuroscience to switch on and off with light. The cells are also upgraded with a chunk of DNA with optogenetics. Parker has linked the pumping and moving fluids in marine life forms with the heart and other aspects of the anatomy. He stated that the idea of this study is to get a better insight into the human heart and heart disease by reverse engineering other forms of muscular pumps that could be seen in nature.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone