A new type of artificial life is called a “living programmable organism”: xenobots, millimeter-sized.
New biorobots, according to official data from the University of Vermont in the publication PNAS, are designed to help in the development of new drugs and in cleaning the environment from harmful substances. But no practical application has yet been found.
Other researchers are confused by the possibility of reproduction and regeneration of these creatures. This unique living system was originally created from the genome of a frog, but reproduces by kinematic self-replication, in which individual organisms find suitable stem cells in the external environment and group them in a cavity on their body. After a few days, the collected groups of cells mature to the “adult”, parental state. This form of reproduction is inherent only in molecules and is observed for the first time in a group of living cells.
It is necessary to note the achievements of scientists in creating DNA “in vitro”. In 2016, an artificial bacterium JCVI-syn3.0 was presented with 473 genes in its genome, while researchers did not know the purpose of 149 of them, reports the journal Cell. And in November 2021, Japanese biologists unveiled the first artificial genomic DNA that can replicate and grow outside a cell using simplified circular DNA carrying two genes for replication. Scientists were able to initiate the process of gene expression and extracellular replication in DNA created in a cell-free system from nucleic acids and proteins, reports the journal ACS Synthetic Biology.
The Francis Crick Institute and the University of Kent have discovered a way to edit the genome of mammals to produce same-sex offspring. Scientists have deactivated the Top1 gene, which is responsible for the development of the embryo; accordingly, the embryo of the “inappropriate” sex dies at the stage of development of 16-32 cells. In this way, researchers intend to solve some problems in agriculture.