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I accidentally grew a heart organoid (of sorts) once. Dissected an embryonic chicken heart, cultured it to make "fibroblasts" (mesenchymal stem cells), forgot a
by twic 4y ago
I accidentally grew a heart organoid (of sorts) once. Dissected an embryonic chicken heart, cultured it to make "fibroblasts" (mesenchymal stem cells), forgot about them, left them in an incubator for week, and when i came back, the cells had proliferated and covered the dish in a sheet of cardiac muscle, which was beating irregularly.
My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay organoid work, it's a huge achievement, but ultimately what it's about is giving cells a chance to do what they're programmed to do.
- _Wintermute 4y agoA project I was involved in was using optical flow to quantify the beating of cardiomyocytes grown in culture. I've done plenty of tissue culture but watching sheets of cells actually beat at a reasonable heart rate was still pretty wild.
- mattkrause 4y agoOscillations are also sort of a "freebie": if Thing A can temporarily inhibit the activity of Thing B and vice versa, activity will start pinging back and forth. It's certainly a neat step forward towards studying brain activity, but the idea that organoids are sitting there dreaming is a bit much.
- eternityforest 4y agoThey can play pong. As far as I'm concerned that's already scary and raises ethical questions.
- Teever 4y agohow far away is this from a 'two guys with the same name fucking around in a garage' (Apple mythical origin story) sort of setting? Like when can I be a mad scientist making irregular beating sheets of chicken heart muscle in my basement?
- roughly 4y agoThere are a bunch of biohacker spaces around, and they’ll often run classes - small scale lab work isn’t actually that restrictive, cost or resource wise. Also, The Odin - https://www.the-odin.com/ https://www.the-odin.com/ - sells DIY kits and classes (and is just generally one of my favorite groups of weirdos)
- twic 4y agoYou'd need: fresh fertilized chicken eggs lab gloves an egg incubator a dissecting microscope tissue culture dishes phosphate-buffered saline a pipette pump 10 ml pipettes two pairs of dissecting tweezers 70% ethanol solution kimwipes lab gloves a steady hand tissue culture medium (DMEM is fine) fetal calf serum penicillin-streptomycin mix a micropipette micropipette tips a tissue culture incubator a tank of carbon dioxide ideally, a laminar flow cabinet, but reasonably careful technique and the pen/strep would probably see you through So, when? Depends if you have Prime really. The thing is, growing sheets of cells is not a big step towards doing anything interesting. You need to do chemical and genetic manipulation of the cells, and that's the hard part.
- nicd 4y agoI think you could do that today? Incubating a cell culture is definitely possible. You can either purchase used lab equipment, or even build your own incubation chamber. I don't think OP's chicken heart experiment requires genetic tinkering, but even if it did, my understanding is that CRISPR is surprisingly accessible to hobbyists. For example, https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/.
- roughly 4y ago> My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay organoid work, it's a huge achievement, but ultimately what it's about is giving cells a chance to do what they're programmed to do. What gets tricky is when you’re trying to program the cells to do something different, because they really, really want to do a whole lot of other stuff, and rarely does making your weird enzyme or chemical top that list.
- irrational 4y agoI am a stick.
- weard_beard 4y agoSKELETON EDIT
- alach11 4y agoIs this a reference to The Way of Kings?
- irrational 4y agoYes! Well, Stormlight Archive anyway.