A paper about electrical activity in cultured human brain cells got a lot of attention this week:
Scientists Just Detected Brain Waves in Mini Lab-Grown Brains
Mini-brains grown in a lab show neural activity like preterm babies
The study, published in Cell Stem Cell, was about cortical organoids, three dimensional blobs of brain-like tissue that are created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
Researchers Trujillo et al. recorded electrical activity from the organoids as they grew and matured. The key finding was that by 2 months of age, organoids began to show spontaneous ‘network events’, or coordinated firing of many neurons. These events occured approximately once every 20 seconds.
As the organoids aged, the network events became more complex, consisting of a series of multiple peaks. By 6 months, many events contained several cycles of activity, with a frequency of 2-3 Hz. This is the same frequency range as the ...
