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Microfabrication is – simply set – building small things, including microscopic and nanoscopic objects and patterns. Microfabrication has great potential in medicine and biomedical engineering, in addition to fields such as electronics and photonics – but first, researchers need to develop techniques that are biologically compatible. A team of researchers thinks that an essential step towards this goal includes the tardigades of the tardigades.
To prove the techniques needed for the construction of microscopic biocompatible equipment, researchers in China have found a way to give Tarto tardigrades. If you think it’s weird, just wait. Their approach, detailed in a study Published in late March in Nano Letters magazine, there may be important implications for the development of live microbotics, such as microbial cyborgs.
In reality, tardigades, also known as water bears, are not just “bold” creatures. They are animals with eight feet about 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) long, and are virtually indestructible. Their stunning resistance to hunger, freezing temperatures, radiation, pressure and vacuum of space have inspired, startling scientists to investigate whether people can learn a thing or two from them.
In the latest study, researchers dehydrated the tardigrades to promote a cryptobiotic condition-a type of half-dead lethargy. They placed the tardigades on the cooled surfaces at -226 degrees Fahrenheit (-143 degrees Celsius), and covered small creatures in the anisole, an organic composition with anise fragrance.
Using a concentrated electronic beam, researchers attracted micropathters to tardigrades such as squares, lines, points, and even a university logo. The frozen anizoli layer directly exposed to the beam formed a new chemical composition that adhered to the tardigade. The team then warmed the tardigade to room temperature under a vacuum, and the frozen anizol that had not reacted with the radius of sublimated electrons (turned into gas), leaving behind only the model created by the new chemical – tattoo. Then they rehaired the tardigades.
The good news is that tattoos did not seem to affect the resurrected tardigades. The bad news is that only about 40% of the tardigades survived, but researchers say this can be improved with further perfection. However, the study suggests that researchers can use this method to suppress microelectronics or sensors in living tissue.
“This approach provides a new overview in the resistance of tardigrades and has possible applications in cryopreservation, biomedicity and astrobiology,” the researchers in the study writes. Cryopreservation is the practice of maintaining biological substances at very low temperatures. “Moreover, the integration of micro/nanofabrication techniques with living organisms can catalyze advances in biosensing, biomimetics and live mycorobotics.” Biomimetics Includes imitation of nature processes in human creations.
Microbots are small robots who can perform tasks within the body of an organism, HOW Submit medicine and monitor and treat diseases. As such, we can assume that living microbots, such as microbial cyborgsThey are hybrid robots that join synthetic technology and living cells to achieve more useful features.
“Through this technology, we are not creating only micro-tattoos in Tardigrades-we are setting this ability to various living organisms, including bacteria,” said Ding Zhao, co-author of the work and a researcher at the Westlake Institute for Optoelectronics, said in a American chemical society STATEMENT.
“It is challenging to model the living subject,” said Gavin King, a researcher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Missur who was not involved in the study. The statement of credits King with the invention of the technique used in the study, called ice lithography. “This progress is a new generation of biomaterial equipment and biophysical sensors that were previously present only in scientific fiction,” he concluded.
