Tiny robots that can transport individual neurons and connect them to form active neural circuits could help us study brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
The robots, which were developed by Hongsoo Choi at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea and his colleagues, are 300 micrometres long and 95 micrometre wide. They are made from a polymer coated with nickel and titanium and their movement can be controlled with external magnetic fields.
Each robot has a number of 5 micrometre-wide grooves that run along its length – similar to the width of a neuron’s axon and its dendrites, the projections that enable the cells to connect to each other. The grooves act as templates to guide the growth of the neurons.
Advertisement
The team tested the robots using brain cells from rats, specifically neurons from the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with learning and memory.
The group created a 500 by 500 micrometre grid of two adjacent clusters of neurons on a glass surface, and used magnetic radiation to make the robot deliver a single neuron into the gap to between the two clusters so it could connect them.
The microrobot could reach its target position within 10 seconds and connect the two neural clusters within 1 minute.
The team believes the microrobots could be used to study the biological characteristics of neurons and neural networks, as well as to investigate brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.
It opens the possibility for neural networks that can be dynamically adjusted and enlarged, says Choi.
For the moment, the microrobots have only been tested in a lab environment rather than in living tissues. The amount of magnetic radiation required to guide the robots is harmless – less than 100 milliTesla, compared with figures in the vicinity of 3 Tesla for MRI scans – but to be biocompatible, the robots would need to be constructed from different materials, says Choi.
Science Advances
