Winning Rosettes

These flower-like structures are neural rosettes – clusters of human nerve cells growing in plastic dishes in the lab. By ganging up together in this way, the cells start to behave more like their counterparts in a living brain so researchers can investigate the underlying processes at work as the brain grows and develops in the womb. For obvious technical and ethical reasons it’s difficult to study nerve cells taken from human foetuses, but animal models don’t provide a full picture of human processes and come with their own set of ethical issues. Instead, scientists are solving the problem with a technique known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Adult skin cells are turned back into stem cells with a cocktail of special chemicals then converted into nerve cells and grown into neural rosettes, shedding light on the earliest processes in human brain development while reducing the need for animal experiments.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by Feline W. Lindhout, MSc. Utrecht University
• University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Image copyright held by the photographer