Stanford Medicine-led research suggests that the human brain is made from two distinct organs that evolved independently and were later packaged together. The study challenges the long-standing idea that one early progenitor cell gives rise to the entire brain and helps explain why some brain-stem cells have been difficult to grow in the laboratory.
The work could give researchers better models for studying conditions that affect the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and ALS. It is a basic-development discovery, not a treatment, but understanding how these cells form is an important step toward studying how they function and fail.