Scientists will soon be able to grow human brain cells in petri dishes. The new technique holds the promise of producing a near-limitless supply of a person's cells that may be able to treat disorders such as Parkinson's disease and epilepsy.

"It's like an assembly line," says Bjorn Scheffler, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida's College of Medicine, whose results are published in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We can basically take these cells and freeze them until we need them. Then we thaw them, begin a cell-generating process, and produce a tonne of new neurons."

Scheffler collected stem cells from mice and doused them with chemicals to make them grow into different types of cell in the body, a process called differentiation. During the process, his team took pictures of the cells every few minutes.

The scientists confirmed that development of stem cells in the brain is similar to the way in which blood cells are produced from stem cells in bone marrow, which led to insights for bone marrow transplants. Thanks to Scheffler's latest research, brain scientists will have a tool to do the same for their work and this could lead to applications for debilitating diseases.