Compromised Design

Anyone who's accidentally worn jeans to a formal business meeting knows that the most practical outfit isn’t always the most socially appropriate one. Researchers designing microrobots – tiny devices that deliver medicine to hard-to-reach areas of the body – need to keep that compromise in mind, building bots that can move efficiently to their targets but avoid enraging the immune system, always on the hunt for intruders. Features that help easy movement tend to also draw attention. A new study investigated this balance, seeing how helical microswimmers (yellow) with varying numbers of twists interact with mouse immune cells (red). They found that otherwise identical bots elicited different responses depending on the numbers of twists in their helices. Details like this will help design more efficient, less disruptive microbots, and could lead to the production of hybrid devices with the steerable mobility of microswimmers and the protective power of immune cells.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Immihan Ceren Yasa and Hakan Ceylan, and colleagues
• Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems,Stuttgart, Germany
• Image copyright held by and reproduced with permission from the AAAS
• Research published in Science Robotics, June 2020