- The new creatures were designed on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at University of Vermont’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core, then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University.
- The computer went through hundreds of potential designs, keeping the best for study and throwing out those with fatal flaws.
- Stem cells scraped from African frog embryos were separated into single cells and left to incubate.
- With help from microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston, the cells were then cut using a tiny electrode, and joined under a microscope.
- “The skin cells formed a more passive architecture, while the once-random contractions of heart muscle cells were put to work creating ordered forward motion as guided by the computer’s design, and aided by spontaneous self-organizing patterns—allowing the robots to move on their own.”
- In their study, the team wrote, “this study, for the first time ever, designs completely biological machines from the ground up”.
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