Minibrains From Petri Dishes Have Brainwaves Like Prematurely Birthed Children

They are the same size as a pea and look similarly to spit on a Petri dish. Yet, the improved mini-brains made from human stem cells have very similar brain activity as do prematurely birthed children.

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Organ engineers do sometimes like to play with brain organoids, which they affectionately call mini-brains. They make them from human stem cells and they are promising for brain research, research into how infections and genetic disorders, and even for practical tests of drug testing. Currently, the mini-brains are the size of a pea and include several different types and create a 3D structure similar to a developing human brain.

The mini-brains are small – about a million times smaller than our brains. But they can still surprise us. Recently, they shocked us when Alysson Muotri and his coworkers from the University of California, San Diego found that their mini-brains have brainwaves similar to prematurely birthed children.

Muotri and his team developed a new way to grow stem cells. The improvements make the mini-brain cells more mature in comparison to previous similar brain organoids. The scientists grew a few hundred of these brain organoids and then monitored their neural activity with electrodes. When the mini-brains were roughly two months old the scientists started to detect brainwaves. These signals are very similar in their structure to the neural activity of prematurely birthed children. At first, the brainwaves were rare. But as they were maturing the brainwaves were more regular and on different frequencies than at the start. This shows the mini-brains progressively developed and connected into neural networks.

Just so studying miniature brains wouldn't be so boring the scientists used AI to study them. They trained the AI on brain activity scans of 39 prematurely birthed children of ages 6 – 9.5 months. The AI concluded that the organoids are developing pretty much just like human brains.

Hopefully, the mini-brains will allow us to pass through a very well known barrier in health research – the brain. Hopefully, soon we will make them more complex and they will be able to help people with problems connected to issues with our neural network, such as epilepsy, autism or schizophrenia.

Sources:

• https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/08/29/755410121/after-months-in-a-dish-lab-grown-minibrains-start-making-brain-waves?t=1567351108631

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