Artificial Organoid Brain Helps Find the Origins of Autism

A new scientific breakthrough now seems to be clearing the path for better research into the origins of brain-related neurological diseases. Human brains by design and function are very unique and hence it becomes very difficult for researchers to take a deep dive into studying various brain diseases and disorders as such a living brain is never accessible to research upon. To solve this major roadblock scientists came up with something called an organoid brain, which is basically an artificial lab-grown brain. And it has just managed to reveal the genetic origins of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

As explained by the researchers, the human brain is immensely complicated. And many of the genes which pose a high risk of developing autism are also crucial for the development of a part of the brain. While studies so far have shown that autism is caused by multiple genetic mutations, scientists have till now not been able to understand how the same leads to developmental problems.

The technology or screening technique used in this research is called CHOOSE, which stands for ‘CRISPR human organoids single cell RNA sequencing' and its goal is to study mutations in genes that put foetal brains at a high-risk of autism spectrum disorder. The same system can also be used to segregate and find out the pathology of any disease.

The researchers with the new system learnt that such autism-causing genes did share some common mechanisms, and that some cell types were more vulnerable to autism-causing mutations. And then concluded that some cell types need to be given higher importance (over others) when researching autism genes. To solidify their findings, the researchers also compared organoid brains created from the stem cells of two patients with autism and they both showed that the same gene linked to a specific cell type had caused autism.