Friday afternoons are reserved for free-for-all experiments in Hans Clevers’ lab. He lets his students at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands test out their fun ideas — which is why no one told him about the poison-producing snake glands until after they were alive and well in the lab petri dishes.
Called organoids, the collection of tiny poison glands proliferating in the lab were grown from cells from nine different snake species. The organoids, described today in a new report published in Cell, seemed frivolous at first. But the more Clevers, a molecular geneticist, learned about the challenges of snake bite research, the more he realized how useful these poison-generating life forms could be.
