cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52109808
The human brain is not a single organ, but two separate systems that evolved independently before fusing together, according to groundbreaking new research. … Armed with the knowledge of how hindbrain cells uniquely form, the team has successfully turned human stem cells into becoming functional hindbrain motor neurons in a lab for the first time.
Yeah this is pretty cool. The front part of the brain develops from a different progenitor cell than the brain stem. There has been a ton of difficulty over the years trying to grow hindbrain cells from forebrain progenitors. It’s because they were using the wrong progenitors. So they may be able to make more progress treating hindbrain conditions like ALS. I have no idea why nobody tried this decades ago but there’s probably a reason.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 So from the abstract of the paper they use two different techniques. Lineage tracing studies in mouse embryos and differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells. Both these techniques are not even decades old at this moment.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.02.662771v2.full
The non-paywalled non-peer reviewed older version of this article.