Dawn of the organoid era: 3D tissue and organ cultures revolutionize the study of development, disease, and regeneration.

Novel and updated approaches of culturing cells in 3D are rapidly advancing our understanding of development, health, and disease. As tissues have been found to behave more realistically in 3D than in 2D cultures, organoid technology in combination with recent advances in the isolation and generation of stem cells, has rapidly become a promising concept in developmental and regenerative research. The development of all kinds of tissues can now be studied "in a dish," allowing more detailed observations of stem cell maintenance, morphogens, and differentiation.

Twenty one years of P19 cells: what an embryonal carcinoma cell line taught us about cardiomyocyte differentiation.

Many different stem cell types have been shown to differentiate into cardiac muscle cells in vitro but P19 embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells were one of the first examples described and have been the most extensively characterized. P19 EC cells, isolated from an experimental embryo-derived teratocarcinoma in mice, are multipotent and can differentiate into cell types of all three germ layers. Because of their capacity to form cardiomyocytes however, they have been used to dissect the role of cardiac-specific transcription factors and upstream signalling pathways in cardiac cell differentiation.