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Researchers determined that when introduced into damaged mouse or donated human livers, these lab-grown tissues could integrate into bile ducts and function normally.

ABOVE: A human cholangiocyte–derived organoid with nuclei in blue and the cytoplasm of bile duct cells in green FOTIOS SAMPAZIOTIS, TERESA BREVINI

Scientists have shown over the past decade or so that organoids—small, organ-like structures grown in culture from stem cells—can integrate into many organs, including the liver, lungs, and guts of mice, and repair defects. In a study published today (February 18) in Science, researchers have advanced this approach in human tissue, and demonstrate that organoids derived from adult cholangiocytes, the cells that line the bile ducts, can integrate into human livers from deceased organ donors. The findings pave the way for new treatments for liver diseases, as well as for the repair of donated organs to make more available for transplant.

“It is quite spectacular if you can really functionally repair the liver by injecting cholangiocytes into an intact liver,” says Hans Clevers, a developmental biologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was not involved in the work, but in research led by former postdoc Meritxell Huch, his group showed in 2015 that it was possible to grow human liver organoids in culture and that they could be successfully transplanted into mice—work the authors of the new study have built upon.

Continue reading “Organoids Repair Bile Ducts” | >

The ones Teresa is handling in this Cambridge laboratory are mini bile ducts, thin tubes that carry bile from the liver to the small intestine to help with digestion.

Teresa also has gut organoids in the incubator, while down the corridor a different team is developing brain organoids.

In fact, around the world, miniatures of everything from lungs to kidneys are being coaxed gently to life. And because they function just as organs do, they are perfect for research.

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Summary: Brain connectivity at birth may impact emotional processing and social development later in childhood, especially in children born preterm. Researchers found children born preterm with a weaker uncinate fasciculus, the white-matter tract that connects brain regions associated with emotional processing, were more likely to interpret situations in a negative light.

Source: SfN

The strength of brain connections at birth may predict the future emotional and social development of babies born prematurely, according to new research published in eNeuro.

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By examining MRI data from a large Open Science repository, researchers reconstructed a brain connectivity pattern, and applied it to an artificial neural network (ANN). An ANN is a computing system consisting of multiple input and output units, much like the biological brain.

Artificial neural networks modeled on human brain connectivity can effectively perform complex cognitive tasks.

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Evidence has been accumulating for almost a decade that the microbiome composition changes with age. In 2,012 research by my colleagues at University College Cork showed that diversity in the microbiome was linked to health outcomes in later life, including frailty.

In 1,895 on turning 50 Elie Metchnikoff became increasingly anxious about aging. As a result, the Russian Nobel prize-winning scientist, and one of the founders of immunology, turned his attention away from immunology and towards gerontology – a term that he coined.

He was fascinated by the role that intestinal bacteria play in health and disease and suggested that people from parts of eastern Europe lived longer because they ate a lot of fermented foods containing lactic acid bacteria.

Although popular at the time, this theory linking gut microbes to healthy aging was largely ignored by scientists until relatively recently. We now recognize the importance that the trillions of bacteria, known as the gut microbiome, have in regulating health and disease.

Continue reading “Scientists Reversed Aging in Mouse Brains With Poo Transplants From Young Mice” | >

The model used to create the most optimistic scenario in the report, which limits warming to 1.5 ˚C, assumes the world will figure out ways to remove about 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury and 17 billion by 2100. (The scenario is known as SSP1-1.9, and those figures are based on an analysis of earlier data by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and contributing author on the UN assessment.)

The UN’s long-awaited climate report, released on Monday, offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming. But it also underscored that the necessary technologies barely exist—and will be tremendously difficult to deploy.

Global temperatures will continue to rise through midcentury no matter what we do at this point, according to the first installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. How much hotter it gets, however, will depend on how rapidly we cut emissions and how quickly we scale up ways of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.

Climate scientists say we’ll need to do carbon removal, in part, to balance out the emissions sources we still don’t know how to eliminate or clean up, like flights and fertilizer. The other, more ominous reason is we may well need to pull the planet back after it blows through dangerous temperature thresholds.

Continue reading “The UN climate report pins hopes on carbon removal technologies that barely exist” | >