Today in @Nature, we report a new approach to studying human brain development and modeling disease in vivo. Human neural #assembloids and #organoids have opened new ways to study development in vitro, but they also have important limitations. Transplantation can provide a more physiological environment, yet human cortical cells then develop within a rodent brain that matures much faster, constraining their growth and integration. To address some of these limitations and obtain more advanced functional readouts relevant to disease biology, we generated #apallial mice, in which ~98% of the cortex and hippocampus fail to form, creating space for transplanted human cortical organoids to grow and integrate extensively. We call these #xenocortical mice (XCX). Nearly 7 years in the making. Congratulations to an extraordinary team and wonderful collaborators! Link to the article below 👇

Our article, led by the remarkable Xiangling Meng, on establishing CRISPR screens in neural #assembloids and #organoids is on the cover of Nature Protocols today

Several staff scientist positions available in our lab at Stanford More details and application at the link below

In our most recent publication in @NatureProtocols, we outline detailed methods for performing CRISPR screens in human neural #organoids and #assembloids. The integration of these screening approaches with human models is becoming increasingly powerful for uncovering human biology and gaining mechanistic insights into disease. This is the 4th article in our series of detailed protocols describing the generation of regionalized neural organoids and of assembloids, and their transplantation, and it serves as a foundation for our hands-on course in our Stanford @BrOrganogenesis. Work led by XiangLing Meng (now running her own lab at Baylor) with Noah Reiss!