Net for cages

Micro robots have learned to capture and move single cells

Grigory Kopiev, N+1

Scientists from the University of North Carolina and Duke University have created microscopic robots for various biomedical tasks. Robots are an array of polymer cubes with metal applied to one side. Due to this, their movement can be controlled using a magnetic field, forcing them to group into more complex structures that can capture objects and move in a certain direction. Scientists believe that in the future such robots will allow researchers and doctors to study individual cells of patients, for example, tumor cells. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Scientists have been developing microscopic robots for various medical tasks for a long time. For example, such robots can deliver drugs to specific parts of organs, or vice versa, do a biopsy, taking cells for analysis. So far, there are only very limited prototypes of such devices. The fact is that this approach has many unresolved problems, such as management, power supply and others.

American researchers have presented micro robots controlled by an external magnetic field and able not only to move in a certain direction, but also to manipulate individual cells. The basis of such robots are polymer cubes about ten micrometers in size with a cobalt layer about one hundred nanometers thick deposited on one face. Due to an external magnetic field, randomly distributed polymer blocks are assembled into chains in such a way that the metal sides line up in a strip. Thus, due to the different initial orientation of the blocks, some of them may be on one side of the strip, and some on the other. The scientists named these two positions A and B, and thus were able to describe the shape of a group of microrobots using a sequence like AABABBA.

The researchers demonstrated several different actions using robots. For example, they were able to bring such a micro robot to a separate yeast cell, capture it, move it, and release it. Both moving and changing the shape of the robot occurs with the help of an external magnetic field and depends on its orientation, magnitude, as well as on the order in which the robot blocks are located.

Recently, Chinese scientists have also created robots for moving inside living organisms. They were also controlled by a magnetic field, but moved somewhat differently: they consisted of a "body" and "hands" that rowed like people swim. And at the beginning of the year, Japanese scientists made a controlled micro robot consisting entirely of biomolecules.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  28.08.2017