Muscle Tissue Actuator Driven with Light-gated Ion Channels Channelrhodopsin

The authors aim to develop muscle cell actuators driven by a photostimulation. Recently, bioactuators that exhibit self-organization have been attracting a lot of attention, because biological devices are expected to have significant abilities such as self-reproduction, self-repair, self-assembly. This study intends to create a Bio-robotic hybrid system which expresses the inherent superior characteristics of a living organism with less invasive control method. To do so, we develop an actuator for a robot with a muscle tissue of developing chick embryos. We observed that the muscle cell actuator is contracted by a blue light stimulation.