MEDULLA HINT BRAIN STEM FUNCTION SERIES

'So you can imagine that during that migration a lot of things could go awry.' 'Interneurons are born in deep regions of the brain, and then they have to migrate all the way to the cortex,' Pașca says. Research News The first wiring map of an insect's brain hints at incredible complexityĭuring pregnancy and the first two years of life, these special cells must complete a remarkable journey. The resulting structure is called an assembloid. When these parts are placed in the same dish, they will even form connections, much like an actual brain. 'We can actually make different parts of the nervous system in a dish from stem cells,' Pașca says. And by exposing an organoid to certain growth factors, scientists can coax it into resembling tissue found in brain areas including the cortex and hippocampus. These clumps will grow for a year or more in the lab, gradually organizing their cells much the way a developing brain would.

MEDULLA HINT BRAIN STEM FUNCTION SERIES

The team did a series of experiments using tiny clumps of human brain cells called brain organoids.

So Pașca and a team of scientists tried a different approach, which they detailed in their new paper. They can experiment on animal brains, but lab animals like rodents don't really develop anything that looks like autism or schizophrenia. 'And that has been really difficult.'įor ethical reasons, scientists can't just edit a person's genes to see what happens. 'The challenge now is to figure out what they're actually doing, how disruptions in these genes are actually causing disease,' Pașca says.

But scientists still don't know how problems with these genes alter the brain. The study comes after decades of work identifying hundreds of genes that are associated with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Shots - Health News Researchers Link Autism To A System That Insulates Brain Wiring

Medulla hint brain stem function