A jellyfish made of silicone and rat heart cells 'swims' in water when subjected to an electric field.
Image: Harvard Univ./Caltech
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From Nature magazine
Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.
“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology.
Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them.
In 2007, Parker was searching for new ways of studying muscular pumps when he visited the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts. “I saw the jellyfish display and it hit me like a thunderbolt,” he says. “I thought: I know I can build that.” To do so, he recruited John Dabiri, a bioengineer who studies biological propulsion at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “I grabbed him and said, ‘John, I think I can build a jellyfish.’ He didn’t know who I was, but I was pretty excited and waving my arms, and I think he was afraid to say no.”
Janna Nawroth, a graduate student at Caltech who performed most of the experiments, began by mapping every cell in the bodies of juvenile moon jellies (Aurelia aurita) to understand how they swim. A moon jelly's bell consists of a single layer of muscle, with fibres that are tightly aligned around a central ring and along eight spokes.
To make the bell beat downwards, electrical signals spread through the muscle in a smooth wave, “like when you drop a pebble in water”, says Parker. “It’s exactly like what you see in the heart. My bet is that to get a muscular pump, the electrical activity has got to spread as a wavefront.”
Form and function
Nawroth created a structure with the same properties by growing a single layer of rat heart muscle on a patterned sheet of polydimethylsiloxane. When an electric field is applied across the structure, the muscle contracts rapidly, compressing the medusoid and mimicking a jellyfish’s power stroke. The elastic silicone then pulls the medusoid back to its original flat shape, ready for the next stroke.
When placed between two electrodes in water, the medusoid swam like the real thing. It even produced water currents similar to those that wash food particles into jellyfish's mouths. “We thought if we’re really good at this, we’re going to recreate that vortex, and we did,” says Parker. “We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish.”
“I think that this is terrific,” says Joseph Vacanti, a tissue engineer at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “It is a powerful demonstration of engineering chimaeric systems of living and non-living components.”
Parker says his team is taking synthetic biology to a new level. “Usually when we talk about synthetic life forms, somebody will take a living cell and put new genes in. We built an animal. It’s not just about genes, but about morphology and function.”
The team now plans to build a medusoid using human heart cells. The researchers have filed a patent to use their design, or something similar, as a platform for testing drugs. “You’ve got a heart drug?” says Parker. “You let me put it on my jellyfish, and I’ll tell you if it can improve the pumping.”
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12 Comments
Add CommentThank you so much for the Rat Jellyfish... this is more terrifying than fiction. Well justified if we can cheat the reaper? You think?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it's a wonderful work of scientific art! It does not need any kind of medical "utility" for its justification. Creativity is the only way to "cheat the reaper": whether by writing a poem, painting a picture or creating such a marvel of genetic engineering. "Unnatural" is not a dirty word: civilization is unnatural by definition.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is really cool, but... did they really just patent a jellyfish? I can see that sort of thing getting out of hand eventually.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think I would be more enthusiastic if animal tissues were not used. It is cool that tissues can be crafted onto synthetic material (lots of medical uses) but something about this just bug me and I can't put my finger on it. Oh well, I will know what that is when I am officially 'old'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd now you can grow a pet like plant that moves and closes its leaves when you Tickle It!.. Google pet TickleMe Plant. No joke ...this is real and actually was easy to grow from seeds,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is with these esoteric and useless studies? How much money and time was pi**ed away on this project?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVyvyan, aside from the stupid cutsey spelling of your name, that statement of yours is inane.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMust agree with Joseph Moore
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience today acts like a baboon with a paint brush the and its called art
What an utter waste of time and money
Mimosa, we have several plants in South Africa that does that naturally, its called "Kruidtjie--roer--my--niet" freely translated "do not touch me" Mellianthus specie
Joseph, try reading the whole article. The last paragraph on page one describes a reason why this experiment could result in something quite useful in medical research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientific American, Nature Magazine, Harvard and Dr. Kit - this article is an embarassment. This cell structure growth project did not "build a Jellyfish." A Jellyfish is a complex living organism with an eye and brain. Scientists must be very careful what information they deliver to the media and to the public. Next time kindly get some help.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswij noemen het "kruidje roer me niet".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy is this more exciting that Volta's original 19th Century discovery that frog muscles contract when connected to an electric current? After 200 years, and the invention of silicone rubber, it is nice to see that an elastic sheet can be made to simulate the action of an opposing muscle. Attaching living cells to an artificial substrate and making them imitate the action of a jelly fish is just tinkering. The cells will not reproduce, and their contraction depends on the application of an external electric field. Also, they will die if nutrients are not added to the water, and metabolic products removed. So, in essence, this does nothing but imitate the MOVEMENT of a jellyfish. It was no less an authority than Svengali who gave up disgust (in the silent movie) when he realized that what he was doing was nothing more than "Svengali making love to himself."
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