In the dish, they’re just tiny dots. But look through a microscope and you can see minute beating human hearts, each sporting its own ventricle-like chamber.
The tiny organs measure about half a millimetre in diameter, with the “hump” of the ventricle rising up from the dish. It’s the first time that three-dimensional heart-like organs have been created from stem cells alone.
“It’s impossible to see the contraction with the naked eye, and that’s why we call them micro-hearts,” says Zhen Ma of the University of California at Berkeley.
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