Growing up in Turkey, synthetic biologist Gizem Gumuskaya was enamored with architecture and how buildings emerged from the bustling chaos of the city. She found that designed environments mirrored biology, as nature, the ultimate architect, constructs complex structures from a single cell.

This led her to seek graduate research that harnessed biology as a working medium in Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University. Intrigued by Levin and his colleagues’ previous work, which combined artificial intelligence designs and embryonic frog cells to create living biological robots that could swim and self-replicate, Gumuskaya was eager to test whether this would function in a non-froggy model.¹ “I wanted to build something that evolution didn’t already design for us,” she said.

She combined her engineering mindset and the self-organization of biology to create mammalian-derived living robots, anthrobots, from adult human tracheal cells.² The adult cells displayed morphologic plasticity and self-assembled into ciliated spheres that enabled them to wiggle and swim through their environments. Not only could they move, but anthrobots spontaneously fused to form larger structures called superbots.

When Gumuskaya explored the anthrobots’ influence on other cells, the results surprised her. When they studied images of these cultures, they saw that these superbots formed a bridge-like structure that connected to a layer of damaged human neurons. This structure resembled an ant bridge, a concept from Gumuskaya’s architecture studies. Like how ant colonies function as a superorganism, the superbots showed enhanced capabilities of teamwork, collectively aiding in the healing of damaged neurons. However, the exact mechanism remains unclear, Gumuskaya noted.

Anthrobots, an extension of their amphibious predecessor, hold promise for biological applications. “Anthrobots are just one example of what we can accomplish by thinking about nature as a design medium. I hope the scientific community will look at cells through this lens and imagine how to create other machines,” remarked Gumuskaya.

Correction: August 19, 2024. The story has been updated to accurately reflect Gumuskaya's affiliations and projects.

Healthy freshwater ecosystems are crucial for supporting wildlife and supplying humans with necessities like food, water, energy, and transportation. Despite this, there is a remarkable lack of data on the status of many waterways, especially in large, sparsely populated countries like Canada.

The citizen science project Sequencing The Rivers for Environmental Assessment and Monitoring (STREAM), led by Mehrdad Hajibabaei at the University of Guelph, aims to close these data gaps through partnerships with communities across the country. In STREAM, community members collect samples of river sediment and send them to the Hajibabaei laboratory, where researchers analyze the diversity of bottom-dwelling invertebrates and certain types of microalgae as bioindicators of ecosystem health.¹

Historically, this would have required extensive evaluation by highly trained taxonomists painstakingly sorting one miniscule species from another under the microscope. To streamline this process, Hajibabaei and his team use DNA metabarcoding. After extracting DNA from the substrate samples, they amplify and sequence specific sections of the genome that are highly variable between species. Then, using the bioinformatics pipeline MetaWorks, they compare these identifying “barcodes” to a DNA reference library to determine which species are present.

Researchers can use these data for large-scale projects, like investigating the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function or the effect of climate change on freshwater species. They also use the data to answer questions about local ecosystem health posed by the community, such as whether a problematic invasive species is present, or whether restoration efforts are having the desired effects.

“We are basically democratizing access to biodiversity data,” said Hajibabaei. “Biodiversity is vast, but a lot of it is too small for us to see. The technologies that we have now will allow us to see that biodiversity through the lens of DNA, and let anyone, anywhere, access that information… hopefully leading towards a society that values biodiversity more.”

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