#immunofluorescence

Flow State

Cells and tissues grown in the lab can be a bit like a bathtub in a showroom: a fair representation, but of limited use until they’re properly plumbed in. A new development aims to solve this with a platform to grow human blood vessel networks, connected to tiny pumps (dubbed Vascularized In Vitro Organ Systems or VIVOS), which provide lab-grown tissues with a more realistic approximation of vascular flow. The vessels can integrate with a broad range of lab-grown mini organs including lung and cerebral organoids (pictured, brain cells in green and yellow, vascular network labelled red). They allow direct study of how blood flow impacts cells, and the team observed how mechanical forces in the flow cause changes in lining cells that result in vessel networks reshaping. The researchers also modelled vascular malformation in a condition called hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia, illustrating its potential for direct disease investigations as well as supporting more realistic lab-grown environments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Tiger H.Z. Jian and colleagues

Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in bioRxiv, March 2026 (not peer reviewed)

Making Eye Contact

Vision begins at the eye's retina – activated by light, electrical signals from the retina travel along neurons via the optic nerve to the brain where they're processed into 'sight'. As this system develops, the neurons don't land randomly in the brain, they follow a closely-regulated pattern reflecting the point of origin in the retina – mapping to the brain in a process called retinotopy. Here, in fruit flies researchers uncover the fine details, involving molecular gradients and adhesive forces, that control the preservation of the eye pattern as the neurons' projections (axons) establish in the brain

Image made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Melinda Kehribar and colleagues

Division of Neurobiology, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Current Biology, February 2026

All Growing Well

The interest in manipulating and analysing neurons grown from stem cells in the lab is wide-reaching – from early normal brain development to understanding and treating neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Described in this paper is a new approach for cultivating neurons: in multi-well plates. Each plastic plate is a uniform array of 384 tiny wells into which cells and nutrient liquid, and to which potential treatment drugs or disruptors, are added. This high-throughput format means a multitude of cultured cells can be rapidly closely monitored dividing, differentiating or dying

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Mark van der Kroeg and colleagues

Department of Psychiatry, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife (reviewed preprint), March 2026

Forced into Life

Experiments on cells in the lab can require growing them in a more life-like 3D configuration, such as on 'scaffolds', rather than as a monolayer on the bottom of a Petri dish. Now, this study shows that subjecting sensory neurons and glial cells to sound-driven hydrodynamic forces in their growth medium causes them to assemble, organise and interact as in a dorsal root ganglion with functional fidelity without the need for scaffolds

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Junxuan Ma and colleagues

AO Research Institute Davos, Davos, Switzerland

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Cell Biomaterials, May 2026

Tooth Wisdom

Enamel is the hardest structure in our bodies, and with good reason – it must protect our teeth from decades of daily gnashing. Here a high-powered microscope pictures enamel crystals (coloured artificially based on their direction) in neat rows on the surface of human teeth from 40,000 years ago. But enamel didn’t stay so neat. Researchers believe human enamel adapted and evolved to meet a changing diet – the crystal pattern became more 'misorientated', which can improve strength, around the time farming changed our diet to chewy seeds and grains (top right, 1,550 years ago). Changes in eating habits since then, including the industrial revolution, don’t appear to have evolved our enamel any further, bottom left (750 years ago) compared to bottom right (50 years ago). Creating bioinspired materials based on tooth enamel might take this evolution further, however, adding more irregularity to crystal patterns to boost strength and resilience.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and colleagues

Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA; School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in Nature, June 2026

Standards of State

If you think of our body as a big tube (I know I do), the epithelium is the sheet of specialised cells that cover the outside and line the inside (the gut; as well as covering and lining organs). In the process called epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which is normal and necessary in embryo/organ development and wound healing, epithelial cells can switch to being multi-potent, migratory stem cells. But EMT also has a dark side underlying cancer initiation and migration and so, alongside advancing the understanding of normal activity, studying EMT is central to wide-ranging research. Here, aiming to standardise approaches so that results can be meaningfully compared between laboratories, an imaging-based framework has been developed for studying this state change from many different angles in both 2D and 3D

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Caroline Hookway, Antoine Borensztejn and Leigh K. Harris, and colleagues

Allen Institute for Cell Science Seattle, Seattle, WA, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Published in Nature Methods, June 2026

Mind Gone Blank

A blank page can be daunting to look at – is it better to start from scratch or bring an earlier version into shape? Scientists wonder the same thing about the brain, where memories are stored in the connections between circuits of neurons in a region called the hippocampus. Examining the hippocampus of mice at different developmental stages, they find dense connections between pyramidal neurons (highlighted in white on the left), compared to the 'edited' network later in life (right). This suggests that, rather than a blank page, the brain starts with a 'rough draft' with more connections than it needs, and progressively removes or changes these based on experience. This neuroplasticity may be more economical, allowing the brains of mice and humans alike to meet developmental deadlines.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Victor Vargas-Barroso and colleagues

Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), Klosterneuburg, Austria

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, April 2026