Scientists Grew Beating Human Heart In Spinach Leaves, A Promising Solution For Heart Problems

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Researchers utilized a spinach leaf in growing a beating human heart. This is to solve the problem of tissue regeneration from small lab samples to standard sizes.

According to Science Daily, existing bioengineering methods like 3-D printing cannot create an artificial branching network of blood vessels down to the capillary scale. To solve this problem, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro used a plant. They grew a beating human heart on spinach leaf successfully.

Researchers presented their preliminary findings in the paper "Crossing kingdoms: Using decellularized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds." It was published online earlier than the May 2017 issue of the journal Biomaterials.

"Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals, and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures," the authors wrote. "The development of decellularized plants for scaffolding opens up the potential for a new branch of science that investigates the mimicry between plant and animal."

The researchers used spinach leaves that were stripped of plant cells in culturing the beating human heart cells. They allow fluids and microbeads, which is the same size as the human blood cells, to flow through the spinach vasculature.

After that, the researchers planted the spinach veins with human tissue and blood cells and finally, they produce a beating human heart. This study provides continuous hope of using spinach leaves to cultivate numerous healthy heart muscles to treat heart-attack patients.

In fact, other decellularized plants could offer a working ground for large-scale tissue engineering technologies. "Our team has many works to do, but the study result is really great," Glenn Gaudette, Ph.D. said. He is a professor of biomedical engineering at WPI and corresponding author of the research.

The use of spinach leaves in producing beating human heart provides a hopeful joy to everyone. Moreover, if follow-up studies become successful, then many lives would be saved.