Scientists transform spinach leaf into beating human heart tissue

Scientists have now found a way to build a human heart muscle, with the help of spinach leaves. This experiment offers a new way to grow a vascular system which has been a roadblock for tissue engineering. A biomedical research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) swapped the leaf’s plant cells for human ones, effectively transforming the plant veins into a delicate blood vessel network.

"Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals, and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures," the scientists write in their paper.

Instead of trying to build a vasculature from scratch, the researchers stripped their spinach leaves of green plant material until all that was left was the fine cellulose structure that holds the leaf together, explains ScienceAlert. To access the fine vascular structure of spinach, the team circulated a detergent solution through the leaves to wash the plant cells away in a process called decellularisation.

“Cellulose is biocompatible [and] has been used in a wide variety of regenerative medicine applications, such as cartilage tissue engineering, bone tissue engineering, and wound healing,” the scientists write in their paper. Additionally, they also stripped the leaves of parsley and sweet wormwood, and demonstrated the technique in the hairy roots of a peanut plant.

Apart from this experiment, scientists have also been researching the use of 3D printing for creating blood vessels, and have just reported limited success in printing whole blood vessel networks.