Reliability of human cortical organoid generation

  • Nat Methods. 2019 Jan;16(1):75-78. doi: 10.1038/s41592-018-0255-0.
Se-Jin Yoon  1 ,  Lubayna S Elahi  1 ,  Anca M Pașca  2 ,  Rebecca M Marton  1 ,  Aaron Gordon  3 ,  Omer Revah  1 ,  Yuki Miura  1 ,  Elisabeth M Walczak  4 ,  Gwendolyn M Holdgate  4 ,  H Christina Fan  4 ,  John R Huguenard  5 ,  Daniel H Geschwind  3  6 ,  Sergiu P Pașca  7  8
Affiliations
  • 1. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • 2. Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • 3. Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  • 4. BD Biosciences, Menlo Park, CA, USA.
  • 5. Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
  • 6. Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  • 7. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA. [email protected].
  • 8. Human Brain Organogenesis Program, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. [email protected].
PMID: 30573846 DOI: 10.1038/s41592-018-0255-0
Abstract

The differentiation of pluripotent stem cells in three-dimensional cultures can recapitulate key aspects of brain development, but protocols are prone to variable results. Here we differentiated multiple human pluripotent stem cell lines for over 100 d using our previously developed approach to generate brain-region-specific organoids called cortical spheroids and, using several assays, found that spheroid generation was highly reliable and consistent. We anticipate the use of this approach for large-scale differentiation experiments and disease modeling.