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Like an artist doing a small pencil sketch before a large painting, researchers always aim to run small scale experiments before interfering with human patients. Organoids are a great sketch pad: simple, lab-grown mini-organs that share basic properties with various organs. Modifying their genetics would give researchers more scope to investigate disease development, but has proven difficult. A new tool, CRISPR-HOT – an amended version of CRISPR-Cas9 which lets researchers tinker precisely with a cell’s DNA – has shown it's possible. Using it to add a fluorescent label to organoid DNA, such as the liver cells pictured, makes key structures (such as the blue structural skeleton) crystal clear for observation. As well as illuminating these key structures, the researchers highlighted how the technique might be used on many types of organoid to answer essential questions about health and disease by investigating how abnormal cell division can lead to cancer.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Benedetta Artegiani and Delilah Hendriks, Hubrecht Institute
• Hubrecht Institute, KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), Utrecht, the Netherlands
• Image copyright held by the Hubrecht Institute
• Research published in Nature Cell Biology, March 2020