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Nathaniel David @NathanielEDavid They deleted most of a mouse's cortex before it was born, filled the empty skull with human neurons, and the mouse walked, learned and remembered [link card with image of a multi-panel single-cell data figure (UMAP clusters and bar charts of depleted/increased cell classes, legend Control / Apallial)] Developmental xenocortication using human-derived organ... From nature.com 5:19 PM · Sep 16, 2026 · 111.4K Views 21 replies · 58 reposts · 516 likes · 340 bookmarks [reply, same author] Nathaniel Dav... @NathanielEDav... · 19h A mouse can lose its entire neocortex and hippocampus before birth and still walk normally, feel heat and cold, and prefer company to an empty cage. That is the quiet result buried in a paper published this week about growing human brain tissue. Human axons reached the cervical spinal cord — and did not, in mice whose own cortex was intact. Empty space was the missing reagent.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
X thread summarizing a Nature paper on 'Developmental xenocortication using human-derived organ[oids]', in which human neural tissue was placed into mice lacking their own cortex; the link-card image is a dense single-cell figure and is not transcribed. The tweet is lay commentary on results with no methods detail.
xenocorticationorganoidshuman neurons in miceneurosciencenature paperneocortex