Artificial Jellyfish built from rat cells

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Artificial jellyfish built from rat cells

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
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”

They also hope to reverse-engineer other marine life forms, says Parker. “We’ve got a whole tank of stuff in there, and an octopus on order.”

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[Anorion]

wow, well done scientists

[Faun]

Artifical jellyfish creating jelly beans, now that would be awesome.

[DeSmOnD dAvId]

Artifical jellyfish creating jelly beans, now that would be awesome.

Jelly beans as by products of jelly fish.....no thanks!

[ico]

I don't think this thing is alive... or is it? I mean, does it have metabolism and the ability to reproduce/multiply?

[amjath]

hmmmm

A jellyfish made of silicone and rat heart cells 'swims' in water when subjected to an electric field.

[Anorion]

no this thing is not alive
it has no organs, no systems, nothing, it's just one muscle, does not even work without the energy field
they put "scientists make jellyfish with heart of rat" in the papers
all they did was keep a tiny bit of rat tissue alive, and made it grow on a substrate that allowed them to shape it the way they wanted

[cooljeba]

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no this thing is not alive
it has no organs, no systems, nothing, it's just one muscle, does not even work without the energy field
they put "scientists make jellyfish with heart of rat" in the papers
all they did was keep a tiny bit of rat tissue alive, and made it grow on a substrate that allowed them to shape it the way they wanted

Yes, actually it shows how a heart muscles function. All hearts muscles contract when subject to an electrical impulse (that's how a pacemaker works). What these guys did was to take a layer of aforementioned heart tissue and strap it onto a silicone surface. When electric field is applied, it contracts and when it is removed, the silicone's elasticity brings it back to its previous shape. Apply a fixed frequency of electrical impulses and you've got yourselves a swimming jellyfish.

It may not be real living and breathing, but close enough. Perhaps there may be more promising specimens in the future.