A minute robotic stingray the size of a nickel and powered by living muscle tissue holds out the hope the technology that created it might one day be used to create functioning human hearts.

A research team at Harvard University's Wyss Institute demonstrated their remarkable creature swimming in water and directed by bursts of blue light. They said it might be possible to build an artificial heart using some of the same techniques.

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Their hybrid creature has a transparent body made of silicone and a simple skeleton made of gold. The ray is propelled through water by 200,000 heart muscle cells taken from a rat. The cells were genetically altered to allow the synthetic ray to follow a pair of blue lights.

The creature mimics the undulating motions of a stingray. Flapping its wing-like elastic fins, allows the ray to maneuver through an obstacle course as it follows a blue light that selectively activates its muscle cells.

Today's artificial hearts are basically mechanical pumps. The researchers said an artificial heart made from living muscle cells such as that in their synthetic stingray would behave more like a natural heart, and would be able to grow and change over time.

"I want to build an artificial heart, but you're not going to go from zero to a whole heart overnight," said Dr. Kit Parker, a bioengineer and physicist at the Wyss Institute. "This is a training exercise."

"I thought that if I could build a stingray, I might have a greater insight into how the heart is built and how it varies beat to beat."

Dr. Parker said his 20-person team was trying to replicate as much of the heart's normal functions as they possibly could with their synthetic stingray.

By building a synthetic stingray, the team could learn how to replicate the animal's ability to respond instantly to changing conditions, much like a human heart does to changing body conditions.

The hybrid created by Dr. Parker's team displays the rhythmic, undulating motion of a real stingray. Replicating that motion is one of the project's key accomplishments. It demonstrates how to use the cardiac cells that power a beating heart to operate a flexible artificial organism such as the synthetic ray.

Tagsrobotic stingray, Harvard University Wyss Institute, artificial heart, Dr. Kit Parker