Artifical jellyfish created in lab from rat cells She said: "A big goal of our study was to advance tissue engineering. Our idea was that we would make jellyfish functions - swimming and creating feeding currents - as our target and then build a structure based on that information. Her colleague Prof John Dabiri added: "I'm pleasantly surprised at how close we are getting to matching the natural biological performance, but also that we're seeing ways in which we can probably improve on that natural performance. The process of evolution missed a lot of good solutions. Jellyfish use a pumping muscle to propel themselves through the water, meaning their movement is based on a mechanism similar to a human heart. This makes them a useful model for tissue engineering, technology which could one day be used to create synthetic hearts or other organs for human patients. Prof Kevin Kit Parker, one of the study's authors, said: "I saw a jellyfish at the New England Aquarium, and I immediately noted both similarities and differences between how the jellyfish pumps and the human heart. The similarities help reveal what you need to do to design a bio-inspired pump. The jellyfish provides a design algorithm for reverse engineering an organ's function. Prof Dabiri added: "A lot of work these days is done to engineer molecules, but there is much less effort to engineer organisms. I think this is a good glimpse into the future of re-engineering entire organisms for the purposes of advancing biomedical technology.