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liar [soylentnews.org] writes:

Human brain cells implanted in rats: https://www.rawstory.com/human-brain-cells-implanted-in-rats-offer-research-gold-mine/ [rawstory.com]

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.

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