#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Published in bioRxiv, March 2026 (not peer reviewed)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

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

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

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

Lining the Uterus

Adult stem cells regenerate the womb-lining or endometrium, and are thought to contribute to the debilitating disorder endometriosis. In this study, using endometrial tissue from humans and mice, the stem cells bearing a high level of the enzyme ALDH1A1 were identified as the critical hormone-sensitive population underlying the lining's development and function – and therefore a possible target for treating endometriosis

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Suni Tang and colleagues

Department of Pathology & Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

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

Published in eLife (reviewed preprint), May 2026

Head Over Heart

The rhythmic beat of our heart is fine-tuned by an orchestra of electrical and chemical signals from surrounding nerve cells. But how these neural signals influence heart development and maintenance remains unclear. The human heart is complex (both biologically and emotionally!), so researchers have turned to a more simple comparator: the sea squirt, Ciona robusta. The C. robusta heart (pictured, with muscle architecture in pink) grows throughout adulthood and has a line of progenitor cells that act as a reserve for further growth. A team tracked these cells over time and found that neural inputs control not just heartbeat, but how many heart muscle cells are produced during development. Understanding the subtle signals that guide heart formation could shed light on the nervous system’s wider role in healthy organ growth and repair.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image from work by Hannah N. Gruner and C. J. Pickett, and colleagues

Department of Biology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA

Image contributed by the authors and originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, April 2026