Must-Reads Organoids

During this extraordinary period of the COVID-19 pandemic and while working from home, it is important to sometimes take a break. One way to make use of these breaks is to read up on the latest scientific publications. In order to help you select which papers to read, we publish a Monthly Must-Reads every four weeks. After the last two editions which highlight the topics of Axons  and Retina, we decided that for this  edition we will highlight five articles related to Organoids. 

Below you can find five recently published papers related to Organoids. This month, we decided to highlight the groundbreaking article by Trujilo et al. in which electrophysiological patterns similar to a developing human brain have been recorded in Organoids.

Complex Oscillatory Waves Emerging from Cortical Organoids Model Early Human Brain Network Development.
by Cleber A. Trujillo, Richard Gao, Priscilla D. Negraes, Jing Gu, Justin Buchanan, Sebastian Preissl, Allen Wang, Wei Wu, Gabriel G. Haddad, Isaac A. Chaim, Alain Domissy, Matthieu Vandenberghe, Anna Devor, Gene W. Yeo, Bradley Voytek, and Alysson R. Muotri. Cell Stem Cell. October 2019.

The authors investigated oscillatory electrical waves in human iPSC-derived cortical organoids by MEA technology. The authors found that organoid electrical activity increased over several months and that human cortical organoids mimic the initial stages of the living human brain. By using sophisticated machine learning techniques, the authors identified similarities between human organoid electrophysiological patterns and human preterm neonatal electroencephalogram (EEG). This work demonstrates that human stem cell derived brain organoids and MEA technology can be used as an in vitro model of functional activity in brain networks during early neurodevelopment. The work coordinated by Muotri Lab at UC San Diego raised world wide interest and press coverage by New York Times, Nature, The Scientist, and numerous other news outlets.

Read the paper here.

Besides the above-mentioned paper, four other publications related to Organoids can be found below:

  1. Engineering of human brain organoids with a functional vascular-like system.
    by Bilal Cakir, Yangfei Xiang, Yoshiaki Tanaka, Mehmet H. Kural, Maxime Parent, Young-Jin Kang, Kayley Chapeton, Benjamin Patterson, Yifan Yuan, Chang-Shun He, Micha Sam B. Raredon, Jake Dengelegi, Kun-Yong Kim, Pingnan Sun, Mei Zhong, Sangho Lee, Prabir Patra, Fahmeed Hyder, Laura E. Niklason, Sang-Hun Lee , Young-Sup Yoon and In-Hyun Park. Nature Methods. October 2019.
    Read the paper here. In addition, Yale News published an article about this paper on their website.
  2. CNS organoids an innovative tool for neurological disease modeling and drug neurotoxicity screening.
    by Tanya Chhibber, Sounak Bagchi, Behnaz Lahooti, Angela Verma, Abraham Al-Ahmad, Manash K. Paul, Gurudutt Pendyala and Rahul Dev Jayant. Drug Discovery Today. February 2020.
    Read the paper here.
  3. Mechanisms of hyperexcitability in Alzheimer’s disease hiPSC-derived neurons and cerebral organoids vs isogenic controls.
    by Swagata Ghatak, Nima Dolatabadi, Dorit Trudler, XiaoTong Zhang, Yin Wu, Madhav Mohata, Rajesh Ambasudhan, Maria Talantova and Stuart A. Lipton. eLife. November 2019.
    Read the paper here.
  4. Individual brain organoids reproducibly form cell diversity of the human cerebral cortex.
    by Silvia Velasco, Amanda J. Kedaigle, Sean K. Simmons, Allison Nash, Marina Rocha, Giorgia Quadrato, Bruna Paulsen, Lan Nguyen, Xian Adiconis, Aviv Regev, Joshua Z. Levin and Paola Arlotta. Nature. June 2019.
    Read the paper here. More information can be found on Technology Networks, Science Daily and Wissenschaft.de (German article).