8.8 Biomorphs and Biohybrids
199
through a “Brownian ratchet” effect. This did not require confining microbes as
slaves on an oared galley, but the energy they generate in this way would be hard to
harvest.
A cardiac muscle is another tool for locomotion driven by molecular motors. Sun
et al (2020) assembled a “caterpillar” (Fig. 8.30d) crawling, like its better equipped
counterpart in Fig. 8.29d, on tapered feet and advancing by alternately bending
and flattening its soft body (like its light-driven cousin in Fig. 6.31b) in response
to muscle contraction and relaxation. Williams et al (2014) used a cardiac muscle
to power a flagellar swimmer. The head of a flexible filament is attached to the
load, while its tail is left free. The muscle, which is only allowed to attach near the
head region of the filament (Fig. 8.30e), wiggles the filament while contracting and
relaxing, thereby setting the swimmer into motion, though slowly compared with its
sperm lookalike, and not well controlled.
Fig. 8.31 Computer model (a) and confocal image
(b) of a 3D-printed heart. Cardiac muscles are in
pink, and endothelial cells that form the blood vessels, in orange. Scale bar 1 mm (Noor et al, 2019)
3D printing spreads out to living
tissues. Noor et al (2019) 3D-printed
a small-scaled cellularized human
heart (Fig. 8.31) using fat cells reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem
cells and differentiated to cardiac tissues. The publication is marked as
a “hot paper”, having received more
than a hundred citations in just over a
year. Bioprinting opens the way to replacements of tissues and organs and
studies of their in vitro models (Mota
et al, 2020).
But this is not the end of the road.
An earlier “hot paper” (Deglincerti et
al, 2016) reports an in vitro system for studying the post-implantation development of
the human embryo. Laurent et al (2017), reviewing technical progress in bioprinting,
set the aim of directed multicellular self-organization into higher-order large-scale
structures, mimicking advanced stages of embryo development.
Our narrative has to stop at this point, leaving us to contemplate the wider
prospects of saving the critically ill or creating monsters.
199
through a “Brownian ratchet” effect. This did not require confining microbes as
slaves on an oared galley, but the energy they generate in this way would be hard to
harvest.
A cardiac muscle is another tool for locomotion driven by molecular motors. Sun
et al (2020) assembled a “caterpillar” (Fig. 8.30d) crawling, like its better equipped
counterpart in Fig. 8.29d, on tapered feet and advancing by alternately bending
and flattening its soft body (like its light-driven cousin in Fig. 6.31b) in response
to muscle contraction and relaxation. Williams et al (2014) used a cardiac muscle
to power a flagellar swimmer. The head of a flexible filament is attached to the
load, while its tail is left free. The muscle, which is only allowed to attach near the
head region of the filament (Fig. 8.30e), wiggles the filament while contracting and
relaxing, thereby setting the swimmer into motion, though slowly compared with its
sperm lookalike, and not well controlled.
Fig. 8.31 Computer model (a) and confocal image
(b) of a 3D-printed heart. Cardiac muscles are in
pink, and endothelial cells that form the blood vessels, in orange. Scale bar 1 mm (Noor et al, 2019)
3D printing spreads out to living
tissues. Noor et al (2019) 3D-printed
a small-scaled cellularized human
heart (Fig. 8.31) using fat cells reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem
cells and differentiated to cardiac tissues. The publication is marked as
a “hot paper”, having received more
than a hundred citations in just over a
year. Bioprinting opens the way to replacements of tissues and organs and
studies of their in vitro models (Mota
et al, 2020).
But this is not the end of the road.
An earlier “hot paper” (Deglincerti et
al, 2016) reports an in vitro system for studying the post-implantation development of
the human embryo. Laurent et al (2017), reviewing technical progress in bioprinting,
set the aim of directed multicellular self-organization into higher-order large-scale
structures, mimicking advanced stages of embryo development.
Our narrative has to stop at this point, leaving us to contemplate the wider
prospects of saving the critically ill or creating monsters.