Next generation of swimming biobots can self-train, showing striking speed and strength
2021-04-22
(Press-News.org) Robotics field aims at mimicking what natural biological entities have achieved throughout millennia of evolution - actions like moving, adapting to the environment, or sensing. Beyond traditional rigid robots, the field of soft robotics has recently emerged using compliant, flexible materials capable to adapt to their environment more efficiently than rigid ones. With this goal in mind, scientists have been working for years in the so-called biohybrid robots or biobots, generally composed of muscle tissue, either cardiac or skeletal, and an artificial scaffold, achieving crawling, grasping or swimming living robots. Unfortunately, current biobots were far to emulate the performance of natural entities in terms of mobility and strength.
Now, researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) led by ICREA Research Professor Samuel Sanchez have overcome both challenges and achieved a breakthrough in the field of biobots by using bioengineering tools. Sanchez and his colleagues at IBEC have applied 3D bioprinting and engineering design for the development of biobots at the cm. range that can swim and coast like fishes, with unprecedented velocities. The key: to use the spontaneous contraction of muscle cells-based materials with a very special compliant skeleton.
Self-training of IBEC Biobots through an engineered innovative skeleton:
While most of the researchers usually work with stiff or tethered scaffolds to prepare artificial robots, researchers at IBEC used biological robots based on a flexible serpentine spring made of a polymer called PDMS, which was designed and optimized via simulations and then printed using 3D-technology. The advantage of this innovative scaffold lies in the improved training and development of the tissue through mechanical self-stimulation upon spontaneous contractions, which creates a feedback loop due to the restoring force of the spring. This self-training event leads to enhanced actuation and larger contraction force in the biobot performance. Such serpentine springs have not been included before in a soft robotic living system.
"We bioengineered BIOBOTS composed of muscle cells that move like worms or fishes, react to electrical stimuli and exert surprising forces and velocities thanks to their self-training with the 3D printed soft skeleton.", states Samuel Sanchez, ICREA Research Professor at IBEC.
IBEC Biobots swim at unprecedented speed and coast like fishes:
Besides the capacity to "self-train", biohybrid swimmer based on skeletal muscle cells developed by IBEC researchers moved at speeds 791x faster than the reported skeletal muscle-based biobots up to date, and comparable with other cardiomyocyte-based bioswimmers (based on heart cells).
"The enhanced forces resulting from the self-stimulation process made ourf biobots design the fastest swimming biohybrid robot up to today by 791x", explains Maria Guix, first author of the paper.
But these new biobots were also able to perform other movements: they were able to coast when placed near the bottom surface, resembling the swimming style of certain fish near surfaces, such as the burst-and-coast behavior of zebrafishes, characterized by sporadic bursts followed by coasting phases.
The work of Sanchez, Guix and colleagues at IBEC open the door to a new generation of stronger and faster biological robots based on muscle cells, of interest both for environmental and drug delivery purposes, but also for the development of bionic prosthetics. In the biomedical field, the possibility of printing such 3D muscle models with human muscles, offers the opportunity to use such highly functional devices for medical platforms for drug testing.
INFORMATION:
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-04-22
Vigorous and rapid air exchanges might not always be a good thing when it comes to addressing levels of coronavirus particles in a multiroom building, according to a new modeling study.
The study suggests that, in a multiroom building, rapid air exchanges can spread the virus rapidly from the source room into other rooms at high concentrations. Particle levels spike in adjacent rooms within 30 minutes and can remain elevated for up to approximately 90 minutes.
The findings, published online in final form April 15 in the journal Building and Environment, come from a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The team includes building and HVAC experts ...
2021-04-22
Diseases continue to be a major threat to coral reef health. For example, a relatively recent outbreak termed stony coral tissue loss disease is an apparently infectious waterborne disease known to affect at least 20 stony coral species. First discovered in 2014 in Miami-Dade County, the disease has since spread throughout the majority of the Florida's Coral Reef and into multiple countries and territories in the Caribbean. Some reefs of the northern section of Florida's Coral Reef are experiencing as much as a 60 percent loss of living coral tissue area.
A new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor ...
2021-04-22
INDIANAPOLIS -- A team from Regenstrief Institute leveraged OpenMRS, a global open-source electronic medical record (EMR), to create an emergency EMR for Indianapolis first responders preparing for a possible influx of COVID-19 patients. This process was completed in a week to allow Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services (IEMS) to register patients, collect basic clinical information, and send these encounters to Indiana's health information exchange, a crucial element to help the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
IEMS asked Regenstrief research scientists for help ...
2021-04-22
Invasive Group B Streptococcus (GBS) disease, notably meningitis, during the first days and months of a baby's life can have persistent effects for children and hence their families, according to new research. Published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, the study is the first evidence of long-term effects including after GBS sepsis (infection in the bloodstream).
This large study analysed outcomes for nearly 25,000 children born in Denmark and The Netherlands, between 1997 and 2017. Results show that children who had invasive GBS infection are twice as likely to have neurodevelopmental impairments (NDI) and ...
2021-04-22
BOSTON - A unique antibody drug conjugate (ADC), which delivers a high dose of a cancer-killing drug to tumor cells through a targeted antibody, has been found in a global phase 3 clinical study to nearly double the survival time of patients with refractory metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The study of the ADC drug sacituzumab govitecan (SG), for which Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) was a lead clinical research site after serving as the lead site for the pivotal phase 1/2 trial, reported superior outcomes compared to single-agent chemotherapy, the standard for treating metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The phase 3 results of the study, known as ASCENT, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"Favorable results with SG versus chemotherapy were observed ...
2021-04-22
A new study has found up to half of all children with language difficulties and mental and physical health problems have been exposed to intimate partner violence, prompting calls for health and social care services to provide more effective identification and early intervention.
The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in The BMJ, showed children exposed to intimate partner violence from infancy were twice as likely to have a psychiatric diagnosis, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and impaired language skills at age 10. They were also more likely to have asthma and sleep problems.
The study also found that ...
2021-04-21
MINNEAPOLIS - Intracerebral hemorrhage is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding within the brain tissue. Survivors are at high risk of having another bleeding stroke. Most of these strokes are caused by changes in the narrowest blood vessels in the brain, a condition known as cerebral small vessel disease. A new study has found that differences in the extent of one type of cerebral small vessel disease may contribute to differences in people's risk for a second bleeding stroke. The research is published in the April 21, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Cerebral small vessel disease is an umbrella term for a number of conditions that involve changes in the smallest blood vessels in the ...
2021-04-21
MINNEAPOLIS - Women who have migraine before menopause may have an increased risk of developing high blood pressure after menopause, according to a study published in the April 21, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
"Migraine is a debilitating disorder, often resulting in multiple severe headaches a month, and typically experienced more often by women than men," said study author Gianluca Severi, Ph.D. of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris. "Migraine is most prevalent in women in the years before menopause. After ...
2021-04-21
HERSHEY, Pa. -- Next time you make a salad, you might want to consider adding mushrooms to it. That's because higher mushroom consumption is associated with a lower risk of cancer, according to a new Penn State study, published on March 16 in Advances in Nutrition.
The systematic review and meta-analysis examined 17 cancer studies published from 1966 to 2020. Analyzing data from more than 19,500 cancer patients, researchers explored the relationship between mushroom consumption and cancer risk.
Mushrooms are rich in vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants. The team's findings show that these super foods may also help guard against cancer. Even though shiitake, oyster, ...
2021-04-21
DURHAM, N.C. -- When marine biologist Eleanor Caves of the University of Exeter thinks back to her first scuba dives, one of the first things she recalls noticing is that colors seem off underwater. The vivid reds, oranges, purples and yellows she was used to seeing in the sunlit waters near the surface look increasingly dim and drab with depth, and before long the whole ocean loses most of its rainbow leaving nothing but shades of blue.
"The thing that always got me about diving was what happens to people's faces and lips," said her former Ph.D. adviser Sönke Johnsen, a biology professor at Duke University. "Everybody has a ghastly sallow complexion."
Which got the researchers to thinking: In the last half-century, some fish have been shifting ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Next generation of swimming biobots can self-train, showing striking speed and strength
