Can you build a jelly fish with the DNA of a rat? “Morphologically it’s a jellyfish, functionally it’s a jellyfish, genetically it’s a rat”, that how Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University describes the jellyfish cyborg which he co-created, in an interview with “Nature”. Parker’s team reverse engineered the jellyfish’s biological form and function which requires a hierarchical design over several orders of space and time.
Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs. Jelly are ideal animals to research when attempting to find new way of solving cardiac problems On a basic level, their function is similar to that of a human heart – they use a muscle to pump their way through water.
According to the authors of the report first published Nature Biotechnology under the title : “A tissue-engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion” their technology will eventually lead to the harvesting of cells from one organism and rearranging in a way which allows them to be user for bioengineered products for use in humans. Think of a heart pacemaker without battery, for example.
For the “Medusoid” The Harvard researchers made use of recent advances in the mechanistic understanding of biosynthetic compound materials, computer-aided design approaches in molecular synthetic biology, traditional soft robotics as well as and increasing aptitude in generating structural and chemical microenvironments that promote cellular self-organization. It’s this combination that fueled the crucial enhancement in the ability to recapitulate s hierarchical architecture in engineered biological systems.
The breakthrough shows that it’s not enough to just mimic nature: it’s crucial to concentrate on function. ”The jellyfish provides a design algorithm for reverse engineering an organ’s function and developing quantitative design and performance specifications,” said Parker in the interview. The same overall design strategy could be applied to reverse engineer muscular organs in the human body.
Caltech graduate student Janna Nawroth performed the majority of the experiments. She began by mapping every cell in the bodies of juvenile moon jellies (Aurelia aurita) This taught her how they swim.
