The Nat Biomed Eng Depunch/Luanlan team develops a variety of long-term, high-density neural signal recording solutions based on ultrasoft neural electrode arrays

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Measuring single to several nerve cell extracellular action potentials by implanting a single or several bundled wires and studying how their emission frequency changes with external stimuli perceived by the organism has led to neurobiological outcomes
including visual cortical function [1] and position cell grid cells [2].
But the number of nerve cells in the human brain is close to the order of hundreds of billions, and the mice commonly used for scientific experiments also have nearly 100 million neurons
.
Recording the activity of more, if not all, neurons in the living nervous system at the same time, to study how they can work together to keep organisms adapting to their environment has always been a goal
for neuroscientists.
A major challenge in achieving high-density recording neurons is how to circumvent the observer effect as much as possible, that is, the cellular damage caused by a large number of implanted electrodes themselves, and the immune rejection that may be caused by long-term implantation, affect the original biological function
of the observation target, that is, the neuron population.

On October 3, 2022, the team of Xie Chong and Luan Lan of Rice University published an article in Nature and Biomedical Engineering titled Ultraflexible electrode arrays for months-long high-density electrophysiological mapping of thousands of neurons in rodents.
A variety of long-term, high-density neural signal recording solutions based on ultrasoft neural electrode arrays were reported, enabling neural signal recording of over 2,000 channels for up to 290 days in rodent models, as well as sampling 1,000 channels in a cubic millimeter brain and recording nearly 1,000 nerve cell signal sources
.
The study pointed out that ultrasoft nerve electrode arrays can record visual cortex neural signals at high density to increase the decoding accuracy of visual stimuli in mice, can simultaneously observe the plasticity changes produced by optogenetic stimuli on a large number of cells, and monitor coupling
between neural signals in different brain regions that are far apart at a scale of several months.

Plate Maker: Eleven

Resources

1.
 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1981.

2.
 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014.

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