2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
The microrobot captures and moves the yeast cell
Scientists at the University of North Carolina and Duke University have created microscopic robots for a variety of biomedical tasks. Robots are an array of polymer cubes coated with metal on one side. Due to this, their movement can be controlled using a magnetic field, causing them to group into more complex structures that can grab objects and move in a specific direction. Scientists believe that in the future, such robots will allow researchers and doctors to study individual cells of patients, such as tumor cells. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers have 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 the movement and the change in the shape of the robot occurs with the help of an external magnetic field and depends on its orientation, magnitude, and also 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 in a slightly different way: they consisted of "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.
