A photo from open sources
It’s hard to believe, but this funny colorful blot – one of the most complex models that scientists have created to study traumatic injuries of brain cells.
A photo from open sources
Growing brain cells in petri dishes is not particularly difficult process, but the cells in them tend to grow in a simple two-dimensional pattern. The real brain – of course – consists of complex three-dimensional structures, with many ordered layers neurons. To fool cells and make them grow in three-dimensional form, scientists from Tufts and created this colorful design.
Each color ring in it is saturated proteins form from silk proteins with collagen gel inside. The form filled with neurons that germinate their axons through the gel. Thus, the internal structure of each axon ring begins to resemble the white matter of the brain, and the nuclei of neurons at the edges make up gray matter. When several such concentric rings come together, they begin to resemble layers of neurons in real brain.
Summarizing the above, this spot (very abstract) looks like a brain, but does it function just like a brain? Observations showed that electrical and chemical activity in response to external stimuli (stupid objects falling on them) in these rings similar to the activity of a real brain. Since the cells grow into a similar structure in just a few months, they may be a model for studying brain response to injury.
