Dragonflies are known as natural drones for its speed and accuracy of hunting, it has almost 95% of success rate while hunting for prey. Now scientists are able to manipulate dragonflies by modifying their genetic codes with some solar powered tiny gadgets. Scientists named the modified dragonflies as cyborg dragonflies. Although, cyborg insects are not a new thing but these advanced dragonflies have something exceptional.

A joint project team named DragonflEye with a collaboration of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Draper Labs started working on the project. They not only equipped those dragonflies with solar powered gadgets outside but also modified their genetic code to make them follow given commands. It looks like a backpack on the dragonfly and it is not more than the size of a little fingernail. Their project report was first published in the Draper journal.

Jesse J. Wheeler, the lede investigator of Draper said in a statement,”DragonflEye is a totally new kind of micro-aerial vehicle that’s smaller, lighter and stealthier than anything else that’s man made.This system pushes the boundaries of energy harvesting, motion sensing, algorithms, miniaturization and optogenetics, all in a system small enough for an insect to wear“. The main purpose of this research was to drive organisms in a given direction by tapping into the muscles or neural interfaces, this process will guide dragonflies to pollinate flowers.

According to the report by Techcrunch, Dragonfly has a set of interneurons which is neither sensory nor motor neuron, it’s kind of messenger neuron. Those neurons help dragonfly to carry steering commands to their wings. Researchers tapped those neurons directly to trigger their movement. This experiment also helped researchers to learn more about the movements of wings.

But there were some problems, activating neurons with electric impulse is not a refined process at all. To handle this issue dragonflies were given a new gene containing light-sensitive protein Opsins into their neurons. Opsins will allow neurons to be activated with specific wavelengths of light. That information will be sent by an interface called Optrode. It will not only activate neurons but also monitor the steering pathways.

Researchers also equipped navigation system with those dragonflies to track their locations and an ultralight weight solar cell to power it up. Draper Labs explained that the whole system including the dragonfly itself weight not more than a fraction of a gram they also added that besides pollination those cyborg dragonflies could also be guided to payload delivery, reconnaissance and even precision medicine and diagnostics.

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