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Lab-Grown Brain Independently Connects To Spinal Cord

Discussion in 'Neurology' started by Hadeel Abdelkariem, Mar 22, 2019.

  1. Hadeel Abdelkariem

    Hadeel Abdelkariem Golden Member

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    Scientists have successfully created a working brain in the laboratory. The lab-grown organ made out of human brain cells also made a world’s first record after it independently “crawled” to connect to a spinal cord.

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    A team from the United Kingdom said the lab-grown brain is the size of a human fetal brain at 12 to 13 weeks. It is composed of nearly two million organized neurons, ScienceAlert reported Wednesday.

    Another breakthrough in the study is that the mini brain for the first time in the world made controlled muscle contractions. The movement occurred after the team placed a mouse spinal cord and muscle tissue near the organ.

    The brain released long, probing tendrils to check the area and later on spontaneously connected itself to the nearby spinal cord and muscle tissue.

    "After two to three weeks in co-culture, dense axon tracts from the [organoid] could be seen innervating the mouse spinal cord and synapses were visible between human projecting axons and neurons of the mouse spinal cord," the researchers said in their study, published in Nature Neuroscience. "Live imaging of the mouse muscle tissue revealed sporadic concerted muscle contractions with an irregular periodicity."

    Experts said brain organoids could serve as tools to explore human brain development and disease. However, it has been a challenge for scientists to create fully functioning brains in the lab.

    The moving brain in this latest study also appears to be extremely small and is far from the full complexity of the natural human organ. At its current stage, it is also not able to have thoughts, feelings or consciousness.

    But the researchers said they still expect the success of their new study to help model brain diseases in greater detail than ever before.

    "It opens the door to the study of neurodevelopmental conditions of the corpus callosum, neuronal circuit imbalances seen in epilepsy, and other defects where connectivity is thought to play a role, such as in autism and schizophrenia," the team said.

    Gray Camp, a geneticist at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel, Switzerland, said the study made “a big step for the field.”

    “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence of functional nerve tracts growing out of developing human brain tissue and innervating other tissues,” he told The Guardian.

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