Mini Heart Organoid

To study the body’s organs and the diseases that affect them, scientists can extract cells from those organs and grow them in culture. Except it’s not always that simple or informative. Take the heart for example. Adult cardiac muscle cells don’t replicate – making them hard to culture – and even if they did, a dish of muscle cells does little to recapitulate an actual beating heart where the cells contract synchronously and are supported by other cell types. The mini heart organoid in the video is the result of researchers’ attempts to grow a more realistic laboratory model of the heart. It was grown from mouse embryonic stem cells using special growth factors to generate the various heart cell types. And, like a real heart, it beats rhythmically. With this improved model, studies of heart development and disease, as well as drug screens, are set to provide richer, more detailed information.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Video from work by Jiyoung Lee and colleagues, Dept of Epigenetics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU)
• Department of Epigenetics, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), Tokyo, Japan
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Nature Communications, September 2020