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 t