ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineered Living Systems With Self-Organizing Neural Networks: From Anatomy to Behavior and Gene Expression.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cytoskeletal prestress homeostasis is a biological principle that governs living cell structure and function.Mechanobiology in medicine · 2026Review
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- AggreBots: Configuring CiliaBots through guided, modular tissue aggregation.Science advances · 2025Article
- The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by consuming other machines.Science advances · 2025Article
- Technology Roadmap of Micro/Nanorobots.ACS nano · 2025Review
- AI-Driven Control Strategies for Biomimetic Robotics: Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Basal Xenobot transcriptomics reveals changes and novel control modality in cells freed from organismal influence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Printing Untethered Self-Reconfigurable, Self-Amputating Soft Robots from Recyclable Self-Healing Fibers.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Review
- Identification of brain-like complex information architectures in embryonic tissue ofCommunicative & integrative biology · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Unraveling the Enigma of Organismal Death: Insights, Implications, and Unexplored Frontiers.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- Cell-Free Gene Expression in Bioprinted Fluidic Networks.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Collective Cell Radial Ordered Migration in Spatial Confinement.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Colloidal robotics.Nature materials · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
All living systems perpetuate themselves via growth in or on the body, followed by splitting, budding, or birth. We find that synthetic multicellular assemblies can also replicate kinematically by moving and compressing dissociated cells in their environment into functional self-copies. This form of perpetuation, previously unseen in any organism, arises spontaneously over days rather than evolving over millennia. We also show how artificial intelligence methods can design assemblies that postpone loss of replicative ability and perform useful work as a side effect of replication. This suggests other unique and useful phenotypes can be rapidly reached from wild-type organisms without selection or genetic engineering, thereby broadening our understanding of the conditions under which replication arises, phenotypic plasticity, and how useful replicative machines may be realized.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.