For as long as she can remember, Marina Sanaki-Matsumiya wanted to understand the mechanisms shaping the bones that form our skeletons. Born with a genetic skeletal disease, the developmental biologist first established an in vitro model to study the transient mouse embryonic tissues called somites that form the spine.1 She then joined Miki Ebisuya’s laboratory at the EMBL campus in Barcelona as a postdoctoral fellow to continue this work with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).2 In a recent Nature Communications study, Sanaki-Matsumiya described how to create human somite organoids, or somitoids, that mimic the tissue’s development in vivo.
Somitogenesis is a complex developmental process that sends waves of gene expression changes at precise intervals, called the segmentation clock, through the presomitic mesoderm to bud off somites at the anterior end of the tissue. We study somitogenesis in model organisms, such as mice, chicks, and zebrafish, but, while the overall ...
