Scientists have used tissue taken from a spinach leaf to provide a supportive structure for vessels in an engineered human heart, enabling the blood to flow through a network of tiny plant-derived ‘veins’.
Creating resilient vascular networks is currently a limiting factor for organ and tissue engineering, says Joshua Gershlak, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts who co-authored the study, published in Biomaterials.
The plant cells were removed from the plant (a process called ‘decellularization’) to create a scaffold that could be used in human tissue.
