Cultivating Azinuszella Successfully in the Lab
- Organoids - three-dimensional, miniaturized models of organs grown in a petri dish - have become invaluable tools for studying human development, organ regeneration, function, and disease progression.
- Existing methods for concurrently studying multiple genes have limitations.
- The research group led by Anne Grapin-Botton, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden and Honorary Professor at TU Dresden,...
Unlocking Pancreatic Advancement with High-Content Screening of Organoids
Organoids – three-dimensional, miniaturized models of organs grown in a petri dish – have become invaluable tools for studying human development, organ regeneration, function, and disease progression. Derived from patient tissues or created through cell and genetic engineering, organoids allow researchers too investigate how specific proteins, or their mutations, influence these processes.
Changes Within Cells
Existing methods for concurrently studying multiple genes have limitations. They don’t provide a complete picture of how cells change shape and move in response to genetic and molecular alterations. Image-based high-content screening offers a better solution, but its implementation and analysis present challenges.
The research group led by Anne Grapin-Botton, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden and Honorary Professor at TU Dresden, has collaborated with the MPI-CBG Technology Development Studio to develop a system for simultaneously testing many different compounds (molecules) on pancreatic organoids created from human pancreatic progenitor cells.
Through image-based high-content screening – a method for capturing detailed images of the cells within the organoids - and quantitative multivariate analyses to evaluate the data from these images, the researchers were able to identify changes in the cells.
From Spherical to Rosette Shape
“By screening 538 compounds, we identified 54 that had a notable affect on the pancreatic progenitor organoids. I specifically focused on compounds that impacted both cell identity and shape,” explains Grapin-Botton. “We observed a striking transformation: many compounds induced the organoids to shift from a spherical shape to a rosette-like structure.”