Intriguing idea of mimicking brains. Technical.
Advanced 'mini brains' in a dish: Organoids that mimic human brain cortex in development and disease by Max Planck Society
"Outer Radial Glia" (oRG) cells are nervous system stem cells that are instrumental for the development of the human cortex and have been challenging to produce in the lab. Now, a team of Max Planck researchers from Berlin succeeded in generating brain organoids that are enriched with these stem cells by refining and standardizing existing protocols for these mini-organs.
Organoids are advanced three-dimensional cell cultures that form miniature versions of tissues such as the liver, intestine, brain, or certain types of cancers, and hold great promise for science. They enable large-scale research into development, disease and future therapies without the need to rely on a complete organism. But there are still many obstacles to overcome until an organoid is sufficiently similar to a real organ or part of it.
In an article published in Nature Cell Biology, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) report they succeeded in growing organoids resembling the human cerebral cortex with unprecedented consistency and quality. They primed stem cells with a cocktail of three chemical potions for a short time at a very early stage of their development. This instructed the stem cells to form cellular aggregates during the following weeks that anatomically mimic the layering of the human cortex. Among those layers grew outer radial glia (oRG) cells, specialized stem cells that are essential for the characteristic expansion of brain hemispheres in humans and apes. This is the first time that these cells have been successfully generated, enriched and characterized in a cell culture system.
"Surprisingly, it is pretty easy to generate brain organoids in the lab by many methods," says Yechiel Elkabetz, research group leader at the MPIMG in Berlin, Germany and previously at Tel Aviv University, Israel, who conducted this research. "But it is hard to get it right. The challenge is to create a very pure nervous system stem cell culture at the start and to persuade these cells to build multi-layered neural organoids with the correct cell types in the right spots."
Instruct the builders of the brain
Neural organoids can be grown from tissue samples, embryonic stem cells, or even induced pluripotent stem cells, mature body cells that have been programmed to transform back to the embryonic stem cell stage. But the outcomes have been very inconsistent in terms of procedures, source material, and also between organoids in the same dish. ... '
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