Modular Biomachines Built from Amphibian Stem Cells

Living organisms remain more adaptive, robust, and regenerative than any synthetic system yet developed. It is thus promising that engineering has seen a surge in novel fabrication materials over the past decade, including a growing catalogue of biological cells and tissues. These living materials have the potential to overcome several problems faced by traditional engineering programs: they are biodegradable, self-powered, self-motile, self-healing, nanometer sized, and contain an inherent biochemistry. Efforts have largely coalesced around biohybrid designs, combining synthetic scaffolds or components alongside living cells and tissues. In complement to this approach, we demonstrate a method for constructing fully biological machines from embryonic amphibian cells, engineered to exhibit a specific behavior. AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform a desired function. The best performing simulation is then selected, and a living biological representation is constructed using a novel cell-based toolkit sourced from amphibian stem cell lineages. These self-powered representations are then released into aquatic arenas and tested for transference of in silico behavior. Further, we show that these modular biomachines survive in varied freshwater and saline environments and can be programmed to respond to varied stimuli across their lifespan. These studies lay the groundwork for future large-scale and automated deployment of fully biological constructs capable of a variety of user specified tasks