Human brain organoids influence rat behaviour

Camp, J. Gray; Treutlein, Barbara

doi:10.1038/d41586-022-02977-1

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12 October 2022

Human brain organoids influence rat behaviour

Human tissue resembling the brain’s cortex can be grown from stem cells in vitro. Transplanting this tissue into a developing rat cortex enables it to mature, integrate into neuronal circuits and influence behaviour.

J. Gray Camp⁰ &
Barbara Treutlein¹

J. Gray Camp
1. J. Gray Camp is at the Roche Institute for Translational Bioengineering, Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, Roche Innovation Center, Basel 4070, Switzerland.
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Barbara Treutlein
1. Barbara Treutlein is in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zurich, Basel 4058, Switzerland.
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Scientists around the world were captivated when it was first shown that cells known as pluripotent stem cells, derived from skin, could be coaxed to develop into complex 3D neural tissues¹^,². These rudimentary in vitro formations, commonly called organoids, ushered in a new era of human brain research³^,⁴. Protocols now exist to generate organoids resembling many parts of the brain⁵, but a major obstacle is that neural organoid tissues fail to mature properly in vitro. Writing in Nature, Revah et al.⁶ report that they have overcome this obstacle by transplanting the tissue into the developing cortex of a rat. Crucially, these transplanted human neural tissues influence host behaviour — a property that takes our ability to study human brain development, evolution and disease into uncharted territory.

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Nature 610, 265-266 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02977-1

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