New vistas opening for brain disorder research

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - 12:42 in Biology & Nature

In a culture flask, 45 lentil-sized globs of neurons swirl in a gentle eddy of liquid medium. These lumpy, 3-D networks of human nerve cells, called brain organoids, have generated more diverse and mature cell types than any other model system of brain tissue to date. Scientists have increasingly turned to organoids, organ models cultured from induced pluripotent stem cells, to investigate human brain development and disease. However, most brain organoid models to date have been cultured on a scale of weeks to investigate early neural development under various conditions. To accurately model development and pathogenic conditions at later stages, researchers need to generate and map more-mature human brain organoids that can gain additional features of the developed organ. In a Nature paper published this week, researchers from Harvard University and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed protocols and culture conditions for human...

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net