Building A Jellyfish

The list of creatures that have inspired scientists to build synthetic, or biomimetic, devices just got longer, according to a report in Nature Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/nbt.2269).

John O. Dabiri of Caltech, Kevin Kit Parker of Harvard University, and coworkers have engineered a thin, eight-armed polymeric sheet to swim like a jellyfish. To accomplish the feat, the team mapped the pumping motions of a juvenile jellyfish while it was swimming. Then the researchers used the collected information to build a mimic from three simple components, says Janna C. Nawroth, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of the report.

The first of these parts is a spin-coated 22-µm-thick polydimethylsiloxane film. Onto that layer, the team printed the protein fibronectin in a pattern simulating jellyfish muscle-fiber alignment. Finally, the researchers seeded rat heart cells onto the structure and incubated them until they formed electrically conductive tissue.

The resulting mimic, called a medusoid, swims like a jellyfish when exposed to a pulsed electrical field. Aside from being a model system to inspire the development of future tissue-engineered pumping organs, Nawroth says, these medusoids might eventually be used to test drugs for cardiac disease.

“This is a brilliant study and is impressive in its ingenuity, the smart and clear design, and the scrutiny of mathematical, physical and biochemical methods applied,” says Klaus von der Mark, an expert in regenerative medicine at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nürnburg. The bioinspired approach the team used to engineer such microdevices capable of propelling through fluids, he adds, “may have enormous potential in medicine, pharmacology, microengineering, and other fields.”