Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- Researchers find a new and inexpensive way to keep organoids growing for a year.
- Axons from the study’s organoids attached themselves to embryonic mouse spinal cord cells.
- The mini-brains took control of muscles connected to the spinal cords.
Scientists have been experimenting with organoids — mini-brains — for a while now, but research just published in Nature Neuroscience takes things up another notch.
Three things distinguish the lentil-sized mini-brains developed by Madeline Lancaster of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge and her colleagues. First, a new method of supplying them nutrition has allowed the organoids to survive and continue developing for over a year. Second and third, they’re the first organoids attached to spinal cords and muscle tissue, and — here’s the startling part — they reached out and connected themselves to those spinal cord cells. Oh, also: They made the muscle tissue twitch.How brainy is an organoid?
Before getting too creeped out, it’s worth taking a moment to understand the rudimentary nature of organoids as they currently exist. The human brain is believed to contain some 100 billion neurons. The most advance organoids so far possess just a couple of million —twice what a cockroach has and much less than an adult zebrafish. Still quite capable, but hardly human, though it’s becoming clearer that animals with fewer neurons than we have are likely sentient. The value of having organoids for researchs, however, is obvious, opening a window into all manner of human processes and diseases.
All that having been said, it can be expected that mini-brains will grow more and more sophisticated over time. This raises all sorts of ethical questions we should be addressing now, before we have a problem on our hands, if we don’t already.
(TEDx Talks)
Slide from Lancaster’s TEDxCERN presentation.
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