According to a report published in Science World Report, researchers from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology were successfully able to create a living-jellyfish using rat heart muscle and silicone polymer.
"It occurred to me in 2007 that we might have failed to understand the fundamental laws of muscular pumps," said Kevin Kit Parker, Tarr Family professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. "I started looking at marine organisms that pump to survive. Then I saw a jellyfish at the New England Aquarium and I immediately noted both similarities and differences between how the jellyfish and the human heart pump."
Parker worked along with Janna Nawroth, a doctoral student in biology at Caltech and lead author of the study and John Dabiri, Nawroth's adviser and a professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech to build the Medusoid. According to Science World Report, the researchers used a rat heart muscle, which pumps when in contact with liquid such as salt water. A silicon polymer which was used to build Medusoid as it looks like a small jelly fish. For their astonishment when Medusoid was placed in the salt water the muscle contractions resembled to the movement of a jellyfish.
"A big goal of our study was to advance tissue engineering," Nawroth told Science World Report. "In many ways, it is still a very qualitative art, with people trying to copy a tissue or organ just based on what they think is important or what they see as the major components -- without necessarily understanding if those components are relevant to the desired function or without analyzing first how different materials could be used."
"I was surprised that with relatively few components -- a silicone base and cells that we arranged -- we were able to reproduce some pretty complex swimming and feeding behaviors that you see in biological jellyfish," said Dabiri, according to Science World Report .
The detailed method of creating the "Medusoid" was published in Nature Biotechnology paper July 22, says Science World Report.
