Reconstructing How the Spine Takes its Shape

Marina Sanaki-Matsumiya figured out how to grow human somites in a dish through a process that mirrors the tissue’s development in the embryo.


Originally published by Nele Haelterman, PhD on Aug 5, 2022


Marina Sanaki-Matsumiya, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Laboratory of Synthetic Developmental Biology, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Barcelona

For as long as she can remember, Marina Sanaki-Matsumiya wanted to understand the mechanisms shaping the bones that form our skeletons. Born with a genetic skeletal disease, the developmental biologist first established an in vitro model to study the transient mouse embryonic tissues called somites that form the spine.1 She then joined Miki Ebisuya’s laboratory at the EMBL campus in Barcelona as a postdoctoral fellow to continue this work with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).2 In a recent Nature Communications study, Sanaki-Matsumiya described how to create human somite organoids, or somitoids, that mimic the tissue’s development in vivo.

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