Di Lullo Elizabeth, Kriegstein Arnold R
Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.
Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, California 94158, USA.
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2017 Oct;18(10):573-584. doi: 10.1038/nrn.2017.107. Epub 2017 Sep 7.
Understanding the development and dysfunction of the human brain is a major goal of neurobiology. Much of our current understanding of human brain development has been derived from the examination of post-mortem and pathological specimens, bolstered by observations of developing non-human primates and experimental studies focused largely on mouse models. However, these tissue specimens and model systems cannot fully capture the unique and dynamic features of human brain development. Recent advances in stem cell technologies that enable the generation of human brain organoids from pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) promise to profoundly change our understanding of the development of the human brain and enable a detailed study of the pathogenesis of inherited and acquired brain diseases.
了解人类大脑的发育和功能障碍是神经生物学的一个主要目标。我们目前对人类大脑发育的许多理解都来自对死后和病理标本的检查,同时,对发育中的非人类灵长类动物的观察以及主要集中在小鼠模型上的实验研究也起到了支持作用。然而,这些组织标本和模型系统无法完全捕捉人类大脑发育的独特和动态特征。干细胞技术的最新进展使得从多能干细胞(PSC)生成人类脑类器官成为可能,这有望深刻改变我们对人类大脑发育的理解,并能够对遗传性和获得性脑部疾病的发病机制进行详细研究。