Cerebral Organoid as a Model System in the Study of Microcephaly

Scientists use cerebral organoids, which are artificially produced miniature organs that represent embryonic or fetal brains and have many properties similar to them, to help them study developmental disorders like microcephaly. In human embryos, cerebral tissue in the form of neuroectoderm appears within the first nine weeks of human development, and it gives rise to the brain and spinal cord. In the twenty-first century, Juergen Knoblich and Madeleine Lancaster at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria, grew cerebral organoids from pluripotent stem cells as a model to study developmental disorders in embryonic and fetal brains. One such disorder is microcephaly, a condition in which brain size and the number of neurons in the brain are abnormally small. Scientists use cerebral organoids, which they've grown in labs, because they provide a manipulable model for studying how neural cells migrate during development, the timing of neural development, and how genetic errors can result in developmental disorders.