Brain organoids: Experimental access to human-specific brain development.

Human brain organoids enable experimental study of human-specific cortical development across time, including prolonged maturation and circuit formation, under controlled perturbations.

• Why it matters: Species-divergent progenitor programs and unusually prolonged developmental trajectories are hard to probe directly, yet they are linked to human cognitive abilities and vulnerability to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders.
• What they did: The review synthesizes how cortical organoids model progenitor biology, cell diversification, and progressive maturation, and how additions of missing cell types, assembloids, and transplantation expand later-stage access.
• The result: Patient-derived, isogenic, chimeric, and perturbation-based organoid systems are used to investigate neurodevelopmental disorders and reveal mechanisms of typical human development.

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