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Artificial Jellyfish Built From Silicone and Rat Cells
ananyo writes "Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat's heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. The team now plans to build a medusoid using human heart cells. The researchers have filed a patent to use their design, or something similar, as a platform for testing drugs (abstract). 'You've got a heart drug?' says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. 'You let me put it on my jellyfish, and I'll tell you if it can improve the pumping.'" The video that accompanies the text is at once beautiful and creepy.
They'll do that too. This just lets you see one important aspect of the drug's activity really clearly and let's you get a little quantitative about the effects too. Admittedly, the really cool thing isn't the application but that they've built something that moves like a jellyfish when you apply an electric field across it in water.
I wonder how they taste fried........
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"You let me put it on my jellyfish, and I'll tell you if it can improve the pumping.'"
Couldn't they, I dunno, just put it in a rat?"
If they are in the rat-heart-disease-curing business, sure.
This will have _human_ cells.
Couldn't they, I dunno, just put it in a rat?
He was talking about the next phase Medusoid, which he plans to make with human heart tissue. You didn't RTFA, did you?
Except that the heart's natural pacemakers aren't nervous, but specialized muscle cells:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA_node
The nervous system is capable of speeding the main pacemaker, but that connection isn't necessary to keep the heart beating. And the pacemakers are redundant, set at different frequencies. The highest frequency pacemaker drives the rest; should it fail, the next slower one takes over.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR