Trying to understand long covid, scientists made mini brains and infected them with coronavirus.

In a new study published in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Sweden and a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston tried to find out by creating “brain organoids,” or miniature brains about the size of a pinhead, and infected them with COVID.

What they saw explained a lot: An “excessive number” of synapses, or connections between brain cells that allow them to communicate, were eliminated during the course of the disease—“more than you would expect to see in a normal brain,” the authors wrote in an Oct. 27 article on academic news site The Conversation.

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