Self-organization and applications of neural organoids

Abstract

Organoid technology has become a field that attract many researcher’s attention and involvement. “Organoid” is a coined word which means organ like-tissue (Organ+oid), and organoid is determined as stem cell-derived three-dimensional (3D) tissues that recapitulate developmental processes and tissue specific function in vivo. Generally, they are derived from pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and embryonic stem cells (ESCs), or from tissue stem cells. The first report that created human 3D cerebral tissue arose in 2008 which is currently considered as the pioneering work of “neural organoid” (Eiraku et al., 2008, Sasai 2013a, Sasai 2013b). The neural organoids provide living human neural tissues that bring opportunities to study human development, human neuroscience, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and evolutions. The neural organoid can be said as “cut & paste” of developmental biological process into a dish. Thus, understanding the background of neural organoid needs developmental knowledge, but current organoid researches looks to use organoid as a tool to study the aim that the researchers want to focus. This leads the organoid research more methodological, and the improvement or sophistication of organoid methods has still been difficult for most of new coming researchers. For this problem, this review provide insights of how to assemble organoid methods from viewpoints of development especially from morphological/structual changes. In this review, I start from the brief history of how neural organoid research emerged from developmental biology. Then I introduce some interesting aspects of neural organoid generation focusing on self-organization of regions and structures. From the viewpoint of a developer of this field, this review also show how to think and adjust the methods to generate novel regional organoids taking hippocampal organoids as an example. Regarding structural self-organization I will introduce cerebral organoid for an example of layer organization in a dish. By showing background knowledge with scientific achievements and interesting aspects, this review will help researchers who want to create novel neural organoids.