Thread by @thiagoarzua

Our newest paper just went live on @MDPIOpenAccess, so you know what that means: time for a thread 🧵

Get some coffee, some snacks and let’s talk about cerebral organoids

@AcademicChatter @OpenAcademics

You might've seen me talking about organoids before, I think they're pretty amazing.

These little balls of tissue are used to model all kinds of neurological diseases, from Alzheimer's to Zika infections.

Shameless plug for a review we wrote on those:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

Even though organoids have been around since 2013, there is still a lot we do not know about them.

So, in this paper, we set out to characterize and compare these organoids to adult and fetal brains. We focused on 3 aspects: structural, molecular, and electrophysiological.

Structurally, we are able to see basically the same cell types that we'd have in a developing brain: neurons, glial cells, and pretty excitingly, blood vessel-related cells.

Highlighted here markers for smooth muscle cells (SMA) and endothelial cells (CD31).

Molecularly (love that word), we compared the expression of genes in the organoids to fetal and adult brains.

Looking at over 20k genes, we were able to describe the differences and similarities between the 3 groups.

Shown here a PCA plot of that comparison.

Electrophysiologically, the organoids had action potentials, responses to stimuli, and multiple ion channels.

One of the coolest things about this is that we might be able to pair the expression of key channels (like SCN3A) to the bioelectric activity of the organoids.

Overall, this paper characterizes cerebral organoids as models of the human brain in aspects of development, electrophysiology, and gene profiles.

Altogether, we hope this study advances our knowledge of how cerebral organoids develop and how can we better utilize them 🧠.

The full paper can be found below (gotta love open-access science!) and I would love to answer any questions about it.

mdpi.com/2073-4409/9/5/…