Heart tissue grown on spinach leaves: Researchers turn to the vascular system of plants to solve a major bioengineering problem blocking the regeneration of human tissues and organs..

Bailey Barton

Mr. Ippolito

Biology; Current Event 6

March 22, 2017

Worcester Polytechnic Institute. "Heart tissue grown on spinach leaves: Researchers turn to the vascular system of plants to solve a major bioengineering problem blocking the regeneration of human tissues and organs.." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 March 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170322152753.htm>.

I recently read the article “Heart tissue grown on spinach leaves” from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Essentially, a group of researchers stripped a spinach leaf of it’s plant cells, leaving behind the leaf’s vasculature. This is a process called decellularization, done by using detergent. When the plant cells are washed away, the remains is made of primarily cellulose, which is natural and not harmful to people. Not only is it not harmful, but cellulose is used in many medicine applications. Current bioengineering techniques cannot comprehend the branching network of blood vessels to the capillary scale. This network of blood vessels is necessary in order to deliver the oxygen, nutrients and essential molecules needed for tissue growth in a human. The research team at WPI, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro have recognized this issue, and have turned to plants. The team explains that plants and animals use different methods of transporting fluids however they are very similar in their vascular network structures. By decellularizing plants for scaffolding, they opened the potential for a whole new start of investigations of the similarities between plants and animals. After extensive experiments, the team was able to culture beating human heart cells on spinach leaves (decellularized leaves). The spinach was able to flow fluids and microbeads, all accurately representing human blood cells in size, through spinach vasculature. In addition to flowing fluids and microbeads, the seeded the spinach veins with human cells. These experiments done on spinach leaves create the possibility to using multiple leaves to grown layers of healthy heart muscle to help treat heart attack patients.

By using plants as the base for tissue engineering has economic and environmental benefits. Plants can be easily grown under controlled environments, unlike synthetic, complex composite materials. These studies on spinach decellularization has shown there is a solution for pre-vascularized tissue engineering scaffolds. These studies finding similarities between plant and animals have shown to be very beneficial because there is cost-cut-down in the case of using this process for medical use rather than using synthetic materials. Looking forward, the research is scheduled to continue, attempting to further distinguish how different cell types grow while attached to and nourished by plant-based scaffolds. In addition to their already discovered areas of research, they plan to explore a secondary vascular network for the outflow of blood and fluids from human tissue. In addition to research, Joshua Gershlak, the paper’s first author, will present the technology and results at the National Academy of Inventors Inaugural Student Innovation Showcase in Boston.

I found this article very informative and innovative. I thought that the authors/researchers did a great job in explaining their project in easily comprehensible ways. I would have liked more information on the synthetic methods used in terms of scaffolds, like a comparison of the two (plant vs synthetic) focusing on medical strengths and weaknesses. In the future I hope to see a follow up on the research, hopefully with great strides towards spinach becoming a legitimate resource for heart attack treatment.