Why Scientists Made a Jellyfish from Rat Cells

Scientists at Harvard and Caltech became a little closer to God recently when they bioengineered a jellyfish using silicone and the muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The creature is about the size of a penny and is fashioned after a juvenile moon jellyfish. Just like the real jellyfish, it swims by contracting itself into a bell shape when scientists zap the water it’s swimming in with an electric current. They call it a “medusoid” after medusa, the historic name for a jellyfish.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish,” said Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard who co-authored a paper about the medusoid in the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology. “Genetically, this thing is a rat.”

At face value, this thing just seems freakishly unnatural. Scientists built a jellyfish like structure with eight flower petal-shaped lobes out of silicone and painted one side with the rat heart cells. It swims by contracting and relaxing the heart cells, leaving vortices of water in its wake.

So what’s the practical application of this aquatic Frankenstein? Oddly enough, human heart research. Once you see the jellyfish in motion, the connection sort of makes sense. Like a real heart, the jellyfish acts as a pump much like a human heart. In the near term, scientists [hope to use the current medusoid](who co-authored a paper about the medusoid in the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology. ) to test cardiovascular drugs, but in the long term, they hope that the biological design will help them design and build an artificial human heart. “I started looking at marine organisms that pump to survive,” said Parker. “Then I saw a jellyfish at the New England Aquarium and I immediately noted both similarities and differences between how the jellyfish and the human heart pump.”

The fun doesn’t stop with jellyfish, either. The team plans to reverse-engineer other aquatic lifeforms including an octopus and will even start experimenting with human heart cells. Now all we need is for this crowd to team up with the team of Virginia Tech researchers who built a self-powered robotic jellyfish to make the ultimate bioengineered cyborg sea monster. Remember: it’s all for the sake of science.

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