With that basic information maybe we can begin to understand how things go awry in disease.” Confocal microscope immunofluorescent image of a spinal cord neural circuit made entirely from stem cells and termed a “circuitoid.” “But we think that developing this kind of simple circuitry in a dish will allow us to extract some of the principles of how real brain circuits operate. “It’s still very difficult to contemplate how large groups of neurons with literally billions if not trillions of connections take information and process it,” says the work’s senior author, Salk Professor Samuel Pfaff, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and holds the Benjamin H. The work, which appears online in the February 14, 2017, issue of eLife, reveals that some of the circuitoids-with no external prompting-exhibited spontaneous, coordinated rhythmic activity of the kind known to drive repetitive movements. Recently, neuroscientists at the Salk Institute used stem cells to generate diverse networks of self-contained spinal cord systems in a dish, dubbed circuitoids, to study this rhythmic pattern in neurons.
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