With a few small tweaks, a spinach leaf can turn into human heart tissue

[Batu69]

Red spinach leaf

 

Offering great potential for heart repair, scientists have been able to transform a simple spinach leaf into working human heart tissue.

While science has shown that artificially creating organs could offer an answer to long organ transplant queues in the future, another more natural solution could allow us to simply repair portions of the damaged organ.

 

According to National Geographic, a team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) turned to a simple spinach leaf to take its complex vascular network and turn it over to transporting blood around a human heart.

 

In a research paper published to the journal Biomaterials, the team explained that the leaf’s vein system used to transport water and nutrients to its cells can be significantly altered when these cells are removed.

 

By doing so, the team then placed the leaf in a bath of human cells that eventually resulted in the leaf’s structure and veins accepting the human cells as a host.

This resulted in the leaf being transformed into human heart tissue that the researchers then fed with fluids and microbeads revealing it could accept blood.

Not just spinach leaves

Just as it would it a regular human heart, the transformed spinach leaf showed it could deliver oxygen through the entire leaf that would allow for the generation of new heart matter.

 

With this new understanding of the architecture of the spinach leaf, the hope is that the organic material could be used as a way of replacing damaged heart tissue in human patients, particularly those who have experienced major cardiac events.

 

Also, the findings show that such a transformation of nature would not be limited to just the spinach leaf, but could allow for different types of plant to repair different tissues in the human body.

 

“We have a lot more work to do, but so far this is very promising,” said paper co-author Glenn Gaudette.

“Adapting abundant plants that farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years for use in tissue engineering could solve a host of problems limiting the field.”

 

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[luisam]

So looks that Elzie Crisler Segar, the original creator of Popeye the Sailorman, had some prophetic powers, envisoning the body-building properties of spinach!

By the way, did you know that Popeye has no last name?

[IronY-Man]

2 hours ago, luisam said:

By the way, did you know that Popeye has no last name?

by the looks , I would say him Sir Popeye "the DOPEye"