Human brain cells implanted in rats: Human brain cells transplanted into baby rats' brains grow and form connections
Also:
- Human brain cells implanted in rats prompt excitement — and concern
- Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases
Scientists have successfully implanted and integrated human brain cells into newborn rats, creating a new way to study complex psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, and perhaps eventually test treatments.
Scientists can assemble small sections of human brain tissue derived from stem cells in petri dishes, and have already done so with more than a dozen brain regions...
But in dishes, "neurons don't grow to the size which a human neuron in an actual human brain would grow", said Sergiu Pasca, the study's lead author and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
And isolated from a body, they cannot tell us what symptoms a defect will cause.
To overcome those limitations, researchers implanted the groupings of human brain cells, called organoids, into the brains of young rats.
The rats' age was important: human neurons have been implanted into adult rats before, but an animal's brain stops developing at a certain age, limiting how well implanted cells can integrate.
"By transplanting them at these early stages, we found that these organoids can grow relatively large, they become vascularized (receive nutrients) by the rat, and they can cover about a third of a rat's (brain) hemisphere," Pasca said.
Journal Rereference:
Omer Revah, Felicity Gore, Kevin W. Kelley, et al. Maturation and circuit integration of transplanted human cortical organoids Nature 610, pages 319–326 (2022) (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03238-x
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Saturday October 15 2022, @08:50AM
Narf.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Saturday October 15 2022, @01:02PM (2 children)
We have a lot of politicians with the brains and ethics of rats...
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 15 2022, @08:02PM
Stop insulting the rats!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2022, @11:32AM
Apparently, a lot of us actually voted for this misery.
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Saturday October 15 2022, @01:44PM (1 child)
Once out in the wild they will over multiply and drive themselves extinct?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday October 15 2022, @01:55PM
They will never leave the Acme Labs, they only come out at night to plot how to take over the world but once morning arrives things remain the same and go back to normal. I have seen the documentaries.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday October 15 2022, @11:17PM
Next try can do the same with turtles and we’ll have Splinter and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2022, @02:17AM
I "implanted" some "human cells" in a rat once. Left it in the sink for a week and it did not spontaneously turn into a superbreed of rats. Evolution fail.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday October 16 2022, @04:24AM
I, for one, welcome our new rat overlords.