We are developing and optimizing organoid models in order to apply them for disease modeling. Our goal is to understand the molecular mechanism underlying the disease development and progression, and we are working in close collaboration with Nikolaus Rajewsky Lab, who is developing and applying the single-cell and spatial technologies in order to understand how the RNA regulate the gene expression in health and disease. In recent years, brain organoids have emerged as experimental and translational platforms for studying patient-specific diseases.
Therefore, it's not unsurprising that most recent developments aimed at improving the complexity of brain organoid models. For instance, we are now able to generate brain region-specific organoids and also use brain organoids for multi-organoid assemblies. Also, various methods have been implemented to introduce vascularization and immune cells into brain organoids.
Currently, one of the most research-advancing technologies that we're using in this lab is spatial transcriptomics, which allows the assessment of gene expression within intact tissue. This is crucial in understanding how gene expression profiles of different cell types vary in different regions within one tissue. Another recent advancement that has been made is single-cell multiomics, which allows the analysis of multiple modules of a single cell, which gives a more holistic approach in analyzing these cells.
We employ brain organoids and single-cell and spatial transcriptomics methods to understand underlying mechanisms of human diseases such as Leigh syndrome and herpes simplex encephalitis. Furthermore, we developed high-resolution and cost-effective spatial transcriptomics methods called Open-ST. We compared and optimized the single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing method to understand how well they perform regarding cell type recovery in brain organoid tissue.
