Title:
Meet assembloids, mini human brains with muscles attached
Author:
Shelly Fan
Published:
SingularityHub, 12 January 2021
From the article:
It’s not often that a twitching, snowman-shaped blob of 3D human tissue makes someone’s day.
But when Dr. Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University witnessed the tiny movement, he knew his lab had achieved something special. You see, the blob was evolved from three lab-grown chunks of human tissue: a mini-brain, mini-spinal cord, and mini-muscle. Each individual component, churned to eerie humanoid perfection inside bubbling incubators, is already a work of scientific genius. But Pasca took the extra step, marinating the three components together inside a soup of nutrients.
Also see:
Miura, Y., Li, MY., Birey, F. et al. Generation of human striatal organoids and cortico-striatal assembloids from human pluripotent stem cells. Nature Biotechnolgy, 38, 1421–1430 (3 December 2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-00763-w