---
title: "Watch This Light-Activated Living Tissue Move"
description: "Meet the tech that harnesses billions of years of biological evolution."
date: "2016-03-23"
modified: "2016-03-23"
authors:
  - name: "Todd Jaquith"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/todd-jaquith"
url: "https://futurism.com/watch-this-light-activated-living-tissue-move"
categories:
  - "Artificial Intelligence"
tags:
  - "biological robots"
  - "optogenetics"
  - "robotics"
  - "RoboticsResearch"
---

# Watch This Light-Activated Living Tissue Move

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/biobot.png>)
*\<em\>Image: Ritu Raman, University of Illinois\</em\>*

##### A New Kind of Robot

Meet the bio-bots—they’re small, twitchy hybrids of muscle tissue and algal cells that seek out light like moths to a flame.

And they’re really, really cool.

The new “machines” were designed by a team from the [University of Illinois](<https://illinois.edu>), led by Rashid Bashir, and the [paper](<https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/03/08/1516139113.abstract>) describing their effort has been published in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*.

The concept underlying these new biological robots is simple, but the potential applications—in just about every field of endeavor where robotics may have a role—are myriad. Bashir and his team “built” (maybe “grew” is a better word) their bio-bots by first culturing rings of muscle tissue from a mouse-derived line of cells; these GM muscle cells, however, possessed engineered algae genes which made them sensitive to blue light.

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/84871.jpg>)
*Illustration of modular, muscle-powered "bio-bots" that responds to light to walk and move. Credit: Janet Sinn-Hanlon*

##### Optogenetic Biological Robots

It’s a technique called “optogenetics,” and this essentially novel *mélange* of eukaryotic tissues responds to the stimulus of blue light by contracting its muscle cells. The muscle rings were layered around flexible, 3D-printed “vertebrae,” whose maximal shape and configuration were arrived at by the team through a process of trial and error.

The researchers even exercised the bio-bots daily with flashing blue lights, training and conditioning the tissue so it would be stronger and capable of greater movement and flexibility.

[According to Bashir](<https://news.https://illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/338997#image-3>), the new design and the non-invasive optogenetic techniques represent a vast improvement over previous biological robots.

“With the rings, we can connect any two joints or hinges on the 3-D-printed skeleton. We can have multiple legs and multiple rings. With the light, we can control which direction things move. People can now use this to build higher-order systems.”

What these “higher-order systems” might constitute can be left to the reader’s imagination, but it requires no great leap to envision the multiple applications of a robotic technology that employs light-activated living tissue.

It seems robotics has finally seen the light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwMT_ok4WW0

### Author social links  
[Facebook](<https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010429595677>)  
[LinkedIn](<https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-jaquith-b5aaa7127>)