A tissue-engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion
By J. Nawroth, Hyungsuk Lee, A. Feinberg, C. M. Ripplinger, Megan L. McCain, A. Grosberg, John O. Dabiri, Kevin Kit Parker. Nature Biotechnology, 2012
602 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Reverse engineering of biological form and function requires hierarchical design over several orders of space and time. Recent advances in the mechanistic understanding of biosynthetic compound materials, computer-aided design approaches in molecular synthetic biology and traditional soft robotics, and increasing aptitude in generating structural and chemical microenvironments that promote cellular self-organization have enhanced the ability to recapitulate such hierarchical architecture in engineered biological systems. Here we combined these capabilities in a systematic design strategy to reverse engineer a muscular pump. We report the construction of a freely swimming jellyfish from chemically dissociated rat tissue and silicone polymer as a proof of concept. The constructs, termed 'medusoids', were designed with computer simulations and experiments to match key determinants of jellyfish propulsion and feeding performance by quantitatively mimicking structural design, stroke kinematics and animal-fluid interactions. The combination of the engineering design algorithm with quantitative benchmarks of physiological performance suggests that our strategy is broadly applicable to reverse engineering of muscular organs or simple life forms that pump to survive.
Subfields: Cell Biology, Condensed Matter Physics, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7955bd5a17972ac439978abebdfb8f94d8133eda
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Citations in the corpus
- Shape control of active surfaces inspired by the movement of euglenids (2014, background): “…and Teresi, 2009) actuated by temperature (deHaan et al., 2012), light (White et al., 2008; Camacho-Lopez et al., 2004), or electric field (Fukunaga et al., 2008), and biohybrid constructs consisting of muscle cells attached to elastomer sheets (Feinberg et al., 2007; Nawroth et al., 2012).”
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- Fast-moving soft electronic fish (2017, background): “Typical stimuli-responsive actuators include ionic polymer metal composites (IPMCs) (21, 22), dielectric elastomers (DEs) (23–26), shape memory alloys (SMAs) (10), responsive hydrogels (27, 28), pneumatic structures (13), chemical reaction– inflated fluidic networks (20), and living cells (14, 15).”