Issues

Summary: This Editorial provides an overview of the entire contents of the Special Issue, highlighting some of the important findings and major themes therein.

Summary: This Spotlight article discusses the exciting promise of organoid technology, as well as the current limitations and what it will take to overcome them.

Summary: This Spotlight article summarizes some of the important ethical issues associated with research involving human organoids and other complex self-organized structures.

Summary: This Spotlight article discusses some interesting applications of physics in organoid research, from computational modeling of organoid biology to understanding mechanical aspects of organ development.

Summary: This Spotlight article summarises the latest advances in using cerebral organoids to model Zika virus infection and the resulting pathology.

Summary: This Development at a Glance article summarises how knowledge gained from developmental biology can be used to guide human in vitro organogenesis, and discusses the potential applications of this technology.

Summary: This Meeting Review summarises the major findings and themes that emerged from the 2016 EMBOǀEMBL Symposium entitled ‘Organoids: modelling organ development and disease in 3D culture’.

Summary: This Primer article discusses how adult stem cell-derived organoids can be used to model human diseases, create personalized cancer therapies and further efforts in regenerative medicine.

Summary: This Review article discusses the basic physical and biological principles that underlie the self-organization of embryonic stem cells into organoids, and how this informs human development.

Summary: This Review article explores the latest advances in both adult and embryonic stem cell-derived lung organoid culture, and discusses how these systems can be used to understand homeostasis and regeneration.

Summary: This Review article discusses how organoids have been used to model and characterize stem cell-niche interactions and how new engineering approaches enable systematic study of the stem cell niche.

Summary: Co-differentiation of endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes from human pluripotent stem cells provides a cardiac microtissue model with potential applications for disease modelling and drug discovery.

Summary: Expansion of human embryonic liver progenitors in organoid culture is promoted by branched-chain amino acid metabolism, while dietary restriction in pregnant mice impairs embryonic liver bud growth.

Summary: In human cerebral organoids, depletion of the tumor suppressor retinoblastoma protein disrupts proliferation, promotes entry into S-phase, and causes increased apoptosis and aberrant neuronal migration.

Summary: Cord blood-borne fibroblasts, a population of adherent cells derived from human umbilical cord blood, generate a miniature bone/marrow organ when transplanted in vivo into mice.

Summary: Human embryonic stem cell-derived intestinal organoids can be patterned into duodenum-like or ileum-like tissue, recapitulating in vivo human development.

Summary: Paracrine signals from MSCs or HUVECs are able to promote hepatocyte differentiation independently, but both must co-exist to allow for the cell-cell contact and organization into a 3D liver organoid.

Summary: Mouse mammary organoids that recapitulate features of tissue architecture and function can be efficiently generated from single cells and used to understand tissue dynamics and cell fate decisions.

Summary: Cbl/Cbl-b double knockout in mouse mammary organoids leads to hyperactivation of AKT-mTOR signaling and depletion of mammary stem cells, which can be rescued by chemical inhibition of either AKT or mTOR.

Summary: Time-lapse imaging, high-resolution confocal analyses and mathematical modelling demonstrate how component cells of a developing tissue can reform complex multicellular structures, even after dissociation.

Summary: Müller glia cells, but not retinal pigmented epithelial cells, are crucial for retinal cell lamination in retinal organoids grown in vitro.

Summary: Culturing conventional mouse intestinal organoid cultures in contracting collagen gel induces the formation of macroscopic tubes, with all major cell types and crypt- and villus-like domains.

Summary: Time-lapse confocal imaging of organoids and embryonic tissues through fixed z-direction culture allows long-term single-cell resolution live imaging of tissue growth and morphogenesis.

Summary: Human cardiac organoids, which represent immature tissue, show an innate regenerative response and robust recovery after cryoinjury without pathological fibrosis or hypertrophy.

Summary: Implementation of a workflow to identify structural features of intestinal spheroids - an intermediate step in organoid emergence from human pluripotent stem cells - can enrich for pre-organoids.