Activated Caspase 3 Analysis in Traumatic Brain Injury Cerebral Organoids

TBIs stands for traumatic brain injury which causes permanent loss of neural tissue. This experiment focused on pressure caused TBI and its resulting pathology. Cerebral organoids are in-vitro 3- dimensional stem cell cultures that display cerebral cortical regions similar to a developing human brain. Cerebral organoids were used because they potentially offer a more humanistic model of organization. The cerebral organoids were grown using the Pasca protocol and then to model a pressure induced TBI, the organoids are loaded into a tabletop blast chamber. The sections were stained using immunohistochemistry for activated caspase 3, which is an apoptosis marker to determine if the organoids reacted the same as a human brain would. In the cerebral organoids the frequency of the blast and the amount of cell death have a positive correlation. Thus, the dose response to different frequencies gives a threshold of cell death like that of a human blast TBI. (Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Zane Lybrand)