Volume 27 Issue 3, March 2022

Increased neural stem cell/progenitor apoptosis in Schizophrenia patient-derived 3D cerebral organoids. Shown are two whole-organoid images generated from a healthy adult iPSC donor (left) and from a Schizophrenia patient iPSC donor (right). Depicted is the colocalization of early SOX2+ (green) neural stem cells/progenitors and the apoptotic marker cleaved Caspase-3 (red). Cells are counterstained with DAPI (blue). We detected a substantial increase in the rate of progenitor death in Schizophrenia patient-derived cerebral organoids relative to rates observed in organoids generated from healthy control iPSC donors. In the manuscript by Notaras et al., it is shown that Pleiotrophin (PTN) but not BRN2 (POU3F2) could rescue premature progenitor death in Schizophrenia patient-derived cerebral organoids. For more information see the article by Notaras et al. on pages 1416–1434.