Gene-Edited Brain Organoids Are Unlocking the Secrets of Autism
By Amit Katwala,
Wired
| 02. 21. 2022
Hundreds of genes have been linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a complicated range of conditions affecting the behavior, social development, and communication of tens of millions people worldwide. But teasing out exactly what effect those genes have and how they relate to ASD has been devilishly difficult. “Nobody can study an actual human brain as it develops,” says Paola Arlotta, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University. But a new approach based on growing clumps of brain cells in the lab is now yielding promising results.
Arlotta and her colleagues at Harvard and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have been working with organoids—three-dimensional clumps of brain tissue grown from stem cells—usually just a few millimeters across. When organoids are left to grow, they start to develop different types of brain cells, and begin to organize into primitive networks that mimic some, but not all, of the architecture of the human brain.
Organoids grown from stem cells donated by people with ASD have been used to study the condition in the past. But...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...