{"id":18033,"date":"2015-10-01T12:46:28","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T19:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/bioengineers-make-mini-brains-of-neurons-and-supporting-cells"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:22:19","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:22:19","slug":"bioengineers-make-mini-brains-of-neurons-and-supporting-cells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/bioengineers-make-mini-brains-of-neurons-and-supporting-cells","title":{"rendered":"Bioengineers Make \u201cMini-Brains\u201d of Neurons and Supporting Cells"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/bioengineers-make-mini-brains-of-neurons-and-supporting-cells.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>New research from Brown University details a relatively accessible method for making a working (though not thinking) sphere of central nervous system tissue.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you need a working miniature brain \u2014 say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work \u2014 a new paper describes how to build one with what the Brown University authors say is relative ease and low expense. The little balls of brain aren\u2019t performing any cogitation, but they produce electrical signals and form their own neural connections \u2014 synapses \u2014 making them readily producible testbeds for neuroscience research, the authors said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe think of this as a way to have a better in vitro [lab] model that can maybe reduce animal use,\u201d said graduate student Molly Boutin, co-lead author of the <a href=\"http:\/\/online.liebertpub.com\/doi\/abs\/10.1089\/ten.TEC.2015.0135\">new paper in the journal Tissue Engineering: Part C<\/a>. \u201cA lot of the work that\u2019s done right now is in two-dimensional culture, but this is an alternative that is much more relevant to the in vivo [living] scenario.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/bioengineers-make-mini-brains-of-neurons-and-supporting-cells\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New research from Brown University details a relatively accessible method for making a working (though not thinking) sphere of central nervous system tissue. If you need a working miniature brain \u2014 say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work \u2014 a new paper describes how to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":371,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/371"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18033"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69439,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18033\/revisions\/69439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}