Brain waves detected in lab grown mini-brains

WASHINGTON: Scientists have picked up electrical activity in pea-sized, lab-grown brains for the first time, paving the way to model neurological conditions and answer fundamental questions on how our gray matter develops.

It´s not clear whether the mini-brains are conscious — the team behind the breakthrough suspect they´re not but can´t say for sure — opening up a new ethical dimension to this area of research moving forward. So-called “brain organoids” derived from adult stem cells have been around for a decade or so but have never previously developed functional neural networks. “If you had asked me five years ago would you think that a brain organoid would ever have a sophisticated network able to generate a brain oscillation, I would say no,” Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California San Diego, told AFP. A paper published by Muotri and colleagues in the journal Cell Press on Thursday said that part of the breakthrough was the result of a better procedure to grow stem cells, including optimizing the culture medium formula.

The other part was initially surprising, but also intuitive when the researchers thought about it: simply allowing the neurons adequate time to develop, just as unborn babies´ brains develop in the womb.

The team began to detect bursts of brain waves from organoids from about two months. The signals were sparse and had the same frequency, a pattern seen in very immature human brains. But as they continued to grow, they produced brain waves at different frequencies, and the signals appeared more regularly, suggesting further development of their neural networks.