Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

But then the question was, cells have to find each other and form circuits.

And so within a couple of years, we started making Assembloids that will have exons.

So the long projections of neurons finding other partners.

And you know how, forgot who said this, must have been Rodolfo Linas or, you know, who said that the brain is sort of, you know, the next evolutionary step towards movement.

You know, so like the nervous system,

There's been this theory that has evolved as a way of like moving around.

Well, we should check it.

Like who actually said it.

But for us, that became like the next objective.

Like, can we actually build a circuit?

that will have a very clear output.

So we would know that we've actually built that circuit.

So what we did is essentially we thought about like the simplest circuit for movement, which is like the corticospinal tract.

So that means that a neuron in deep layers of the cortex sends long axons all the way to the spinal cord, finds a motor neuron, makes a connection, then the motor neuron leaves the spinal cord, goes to the muscle.

And essentially, you only have these two neurons, right, that are connecting with each other, with the muscle, two connections, one between the two of them, and one with the muscle.

So the simplest of circuits that you can have.

It's very simple.

And of course, like in other species, it's a little bit more complicated.

It turns out that in mice, there's an additional neuron there.

So there are some changes that happened over evolution.