Can not bear to look!

Jay Gopalakrishnan, senior research author at Düsseldorf University Hospital, said: "Our work emphasizes the remarkable ability of brain organoids to produce primitive sensory structures that are photosensitive and similar to the cell types found in the body

Many aspects of human brain development and diseases can be studied with 3D brain organs derived from pluripotent stem cells, which can produce all types of cells in the body

In the past, pluripotent stem cells were used to produce optic nerve cups mainly to produce pure retina

To achieve this feat, Gopalakrishnan and his team modified their previously developed protocol for transforming induced pluripotent stem cells into neural tissue

Through 16 independent batches from 4 iPSC donors, the researchers generated 314 brain organoids, 72% of which formed the optic nerve cup, which shows that the method is reproducible

In future research, they plan to develop a strategy to enable the optic nerve cup to survive for a long time and use them to study the mechanisms that cause retinal diseases

Elke Gabriel, Walid Albanna, Giovanni Pasquini, Anand Ramani, Natasa Josipovic, Aruljothi Mariappan, Friedrich Schinzel, Celeste M.