‘Brain blobs’ genetically engineered from stem cells can track effects of Zika virus

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When grown in suspension, induced stem cells can generate neurons that grow into three-dimensional brain blobs. Credit: Spectrum News
[C]ombined with gene editing techniques like CRISPR, it seems like there’s almost nothing you can’t just whip up in a lab. Tiny, folded blobs of brain tissue, for example.

A group of scientists from MIT, Harvard and the Austrian Academy of Sciences [are] figuring out new ways to study how brains develop, and even used their latest brain blobs to study the effects of Zika virus…But the big takeaway from the research…was finding a hack that makes it easier to develop a realistic model of the human brain.

The study started with human embryonic stem cells…The scientists had a hunch that altering a certain set genes would change the way brains developed, so they used CRISPR to delete the PTEN gene…out of some of the stem cells and grew each set into organoids, little pieces of brain tissue.

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Brain blobs made from human embryonic stem cells. The left image shows a normal neuron clump and the right image shows a neuron clump with the PTEN gene missing.
[T]he model isn’t a perfect representation of a human brain,…[but] this work reveals the importance of certain proteins in regulating brain growth and development, and the hack allowed scientists to…explore how factors like Zika might interact.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: New Genetically Engineered Brain Blobs Can Help Us Study Zika

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