ETH Zurich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, 4058, Basel, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2017 Apr 20;7(1):978. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-00981-4.
We present a novel, all-electric approach to record and to precisely control the activity of tens of individual presynaptic neurons. The method allows for parallel mapping of the efficacy of multiple synapses and of the resulting dynamics of postsynaptic neurons in a cortical culture. For the measurements, we combine an extracellular high-density microelectrode array, featuring 11'000 electrodes for extracellular recording and stimulation, with intracellular patch-clamp recording. We are able to identify the contributions of individual presynaptic neurons - including inhibitory and excitatory synaptic inputs - to postsynaptic potentials, which enables us to study dendritic integration. Since the electrical stimuli can be controlled at microsecond resolution, our method enables to evoke action potentials at tens of presynaptic cells in precisely orchestrated sequences of high reliability and minimum jitter. We demonstrate the potential of this method by evoking short- and long-term synaptic plasticity through manipulation of multiple synaptic inputs to a specific neuron.
我们提出了一种新颖的全电控方法，可记录和精确控制数十个单个突触前神经元的活动。该方法允许在皮质培养物中并行映射多个突触的功效以及随后的突触后神经元的动力学。对于测量，我们将具有 11'000 个用于细胞外记录和刺激的电极的细胞外高密度微电极阵列与细胞内膜片钳记录相结合。我们能够识别单个突触前神经元的贡献-包括抑制性和兴奋性突触输入-到突触后电位，这使我们能够研究树突整合。由于电刺激可以在微秒分辨率下进行控制，因此我们的方法能够以高可靠性和最小抖动的精确协调序列在数十个突触前细胞中引发动作电位。我们通过操纵特定神经元的多个突触输入来诱发短期和长期突触可塑性，证明了该方法的潜力。
