You know for sure that to describe the Cyberplasm is going to be a mouthful – it is called the synthetic-biology microscale biohybrid robot. Sounds out of this world for sure, but then again, sometimes science needs to make advances in a very different manner in order to break open the new frontier. Cyberplasm integration is achieved through a combination of nano/microscale fabrication as well as matching the synthetic biology with materials development. The latter will be an iterative process, where the Cyberplasm’s will obviously feature a bunch of functions.
At its core lies a hydrogel with tunable mechanical properties and a microbial fuel cell, and the hydrogel is capable of being modified thanks to microscale patterning of PEI in order to pave the way for adhesion of myotubes. In the words of the creative team behind the Cyberplasm, “Additionally, mechanical properties of the hydrogel will be tuned via cross-linking to allow maximum motile propulsion of myotubes. The force that myotubes exert on the hydrogel will be assessed by the displacement of embedded fluorescent beads followed by subsequent finite element analysis. We plan to develop a new microbial fuel cell technology to power Cyberplasm electronics.” It would be great to read about a real life application of Cyberplasm, but it is pretty much geeky stuff at the moment.
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