Human brain organoidJESSICA MARIANIAn examination of tiny, brain-like organoids generated from the skin cells of patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggests that the condition may be associated with an overproduction of inhibitory neurons, among other things. The study, published today (July 16) in Cell, reveals that although the patients’ symptoms arose spontaneously, their brain cells behaved similarly in vitro.
“These are patients with idiopathic autism that do not share any genetic causes, and yet the authors find phenotypes shared between their cells. That’s impressive,” said neuroscientist and stem cell biologist Alysson Muotri of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “If someone had asked me, I would have said, ‘You won’t find anything in common, it’s probably going to be a mixed bag.’ But no . . . there seems to be key things that are dysregulated in all of them.” (See “Opinion: New Models for ASD,” The Scientist, May 14, 2015.)
Indeed, “one of the most exciting aspects of the work is that it manages to tackle idiopathic neurological disease,” agreed Magdalena Götz of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, who ...
