The so-called “mini brains,” which are 4 mm long, are far from being anywhere near as functional as a living being’s brain — they are incapable of thought. However, this is the first time scientists have been able to recreate the brain’s structure, according to BBC News.
By creating the brain in a lab setting, scientists may now be able to gain wider insight into the way diseases affect the brain. The team would like to what common disorders like schizophrenia and autism have on the brain.
This discovery could even reduce the amount of lab testing done on rodents, as scientists could experiment on actual brain tissue without the need of a host.
The team, from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, created the “mini brains” with embryonic stem cells or adult skin cells. This created the neuroectoderm, or the part of an embryo that develops into the brain and spinal cord.
The neuroectoderm was then placed in tiny droplets of gel and then into a bioreactor, which is a bath that provides nutrients and oxygen. It took two months for the “mini brains” to reach their maxium size of 4 mm.
“In the dorsal cortical regions of the organoids, stem cells look like those in a human embryo at nine or ten weeks,” said Madeline Lancaster, a postdoctorate fellow at the Institute.
Ars Technica points out that the process of creating these organoids was different than previous attempts — rather than try to force the cells to form a cortex, the team instead let the brains organize themselves.
The organoids have in fact already contributed to better understanding of the disease microencephaly, which causes sufferers to develop much smaller brains.
The team created a “mini brain” using the skin cells of a microencephaly patient to see how development differed from otherwise normal brain growth. They discovered that neurons in the brain “specialize” too early, meaning that neurons don’t become big enough to form regular-sized brains.
“I think it’s just mindboggling,” Professor Paul Matthews of Imperial College London told the BBC. “The idea that we can take a cell from a skin and turn it into, even though it’s only the size of a pea, is starting to look like a brain and starting to show some of the behaviours of a tiny brain, I think is just extraordinary.”
The findings were published in the journal Nature.
