A critical impediment to neuroscience research is finding accessible and ethical human brain tissue to comprehensively assay. Trusted model systems exist, but non-human models fail to fully recapitulate the human brain in terms of structural, functional, or cellular makeup. Brain organoids, three-dimensional brain-like tissue cultures created from pluripotent stem cells, are poised to address this issue. By leveraging the intrinsic nature of stem cells to self-organize, an in vitro culture can be fabricated that mimics the functions and structures of an in vivo brain; notably, brain organoids can form neural rosettes, which resemble the early developing neural tube and will later develop major neuronal and glial cell types typically seen in the dorsal forebrain at mid-gestation. With prolonged culture, organoids have been shown to mimic more complex brain functions; organoids modeling human dorsal forebrain have been shown to exhibit slow wave neural oscillations and possess functional and structural neural circuit complexity which suggests the capability of producing different states of information processing. As stem cells and organoid model capabilities improve over time, the impending integration of organoid usage in more translational settings underscores the pressing need for further validation and improvement of the brain organoid model. 

Event Host: Christopher Nguyen, Ph.D. Student, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics

Advisor: Sofie Salama