Ricerc@Sapienza

Simultaneous multisite recording using multi-electrode arrays (MEAs) in cultured neurons, brain slices, and organoids is an emerging technique in the field of network electrophysiology. Indeed, deciphering neural network function in health and disease requires recording from many active neurons simultaneously. Over the past 40 years, great efforts have been made by both scientists and companies, to advance this technique. The MEA technique has been widely applied to many regions of the brain, retina, heart, and muscle at the network level. However, while electrophysiological approaches have improved rapidly for 2D cultures, only in the past several years have advances been made to overcome limitations posed by the three-dimensionality of brain organoids.
Brain organoids have become widely used to study the human brain in vitro. As pluripotent stem cell-derived structures recapitulating physiological cell types and architecture, brain organoids bridge the gap between relatively simple 2D human cell cultures and non-human animal models. This allows for high complexity and physiological relevance in a controlled in vitro setting, opening the door for a variety of applications including development and disease modeling and high-throughput screening. While technologies such as single-cell sequencing have led to significant advances in brain organoid characterization and understanding, improved functional analysis (especially electrophysiology) is needed to realize the full potential of brain organoids. Parallel to recent advances in optical Ca(2+) imaging, an emerging approach consists of adopting complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology to realize MEA devices.
This novel MEA platform allows nowadays to record from several thousands of single neurons at sub-millisecond temporal resolution, shedding light on the mechanisms underlying brain functions and dysfunctions at the network level that remained largely unknown due to the technical difficulties.