Add this to the list of things you can grow in a petri dish: An honest-to-goodness mini-kidney.
Australian scientists have successfully developed a method that allows mini-kidneys to be grown from stem cells in a lab — an achievement that could help with drug research, as well as one day possibly providing assistance to those in desperate need of a kidney transplant.
Using stem cells derived from human skin cells known as fibroblasts, the team “encouraged” the cells to form a miniature organ, Melissa Little, a professor at the University of Queensland, told Mashable Australia. The research was published in Nature.