April 12, 2018

From the Young-Pearse lab, Lagomarsino and Srikanth et al. highlight the utility of modeling disease with a three-dimensional culture method, allowing for the study of developing cortical morphology in human cells. This provides a new tool to study the neurodevelopmental consequences of disease-associated mutations. Here, they study the effects of isogenic DISC1 mutation in cerebral organoids. DISC1 has been implicated in psychiatric disease based on genetic studies, including its interruption by a balanced translocation that increases the risk of major mental illness.  DISC1-mutant cerebral organoids display disorganized structural morphology and impaired proliferation, which is phenocopied by WNT agonism and rescued by WNT antagonism. Read more here.