In Massachusetts, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison and Arkansas State University, took a spinach leaf and grew a piece of heart tissue on it, choosing spinach because it was a food they often brought in for lunch. Sounds strange and somewhat magical, but makes sense once you remove the plant cells from the spinach and replace it with human heart tissue, allowing the spinach leaf to use its veins and allow fluids to go through it like a regular human heart vascular system.
Before you get hopes up that we’ll soon be able to grow new heart tissue from spinach plants to use in a medical setting, researchers warn that is still years away. Their ultimate goal is to grow the tissue on plants to be grafted onto damaged organs, but the challenge is to understand what happens when that spinach-grown heart tissue is implanted onto a human body – will it be rejected or have a negative reaction? Will it degrade over time? Next steps for the research team include testing it on mammals to see what happens.