Brain in a dish comes alive
A computer chip marinated in neurons and stem cells creates super bursts of activity and could someday help stroke victims’ brains heal, a new study has revealed.
A computer chip marinated in neurons and stem cells creates super bursts of activity and could someday help stroke victims’ brains heal, a new study has revealed.
A stroke is likened to a meteorite impact. There is a central “core of death” surrounded by silenced neural networks. No one has yet found a way to turn these neurons back on.
But by adding adult stem cells to a “brain in a dish”, comprising rat neurons, researchers at the University of Florida say there is a possibility of rebooting the brain, essentially waking up quiet circuits and regenerating the core.
University of Florida scientist, Thomas DeMarse, says the researchers were taking normal neurons, simulating a stroke and implanting adult stem cells.
The brain in the dish, or as the scientists refer to it, the “biologically relevant neural model”, is a computer chip with 60 microelectrodes that measures the action potential of neurons grown on top.
The microelectrode array (MEA) records the brain cell signals to allow the scientists to analyse them.
“The beauty of the MEA is that it doesn’t just tell you the activity of one neuron, it tells you the activity of hundreds at the same time,” Dr DeMarse says.
Researchers first put cells from an embryonic rat brain in the dish. Those neurons began firing and gradually started “talking” to one another. After about a month, the cells generated stable activity patterns, bursting in unison.
At this point the scientists added neural progenitors, adult stem cells, to the network in the dish. The adult stem cells were harvested from rats and were tagged with green fluorescent proteins so they could be distinguished from the original cells in the dish.
“After we got the stem cells in, one of the things we wanted to know is, ‘are they functionally integrating into the network?'” Dr DeMarse says.
“One of the first things we saw was a dramatic change in the pattern of activity,” he says.
The co-culture generated super bursts of activity, which is usually only found in a developing mammalian brain.
“If you rebuild an area [of the brain], you somehow have to get it to talk to the surrounding areas,” Dr DeMarse says.
