"We took a rat apart and rebuilt it as a jellyfish."
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Wednesday, July 25, 2012 at 11:00 (7080/13)
Categories:
Science
Researchers at Harvard University have built an artificial jellyfish using a sheet of silicone and rat heart cells, which they lovingly call a medusoid. When electricity is run through the tank, it swims exactly like a real jellyfish.
"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 Biotechnology1.
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.
Please enter your comment below. Hit Return twice (leaving a completely blank line) between paragraphs.
Use [b] for bold [/b] and [i] for italic [/i]. All other HTML commands will be stripped.
Your comment is (almost) immediately placed online as soon as you hit 'Post'.
Specifying an email address is optional. In the interests of your own privacy, CoN discourages you from doing so. Further, think twice about revealing any other personal information including telephone number, real name, exact address or blood type.
* A red asterisk denotes a required field.