The recent availability of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) holds great promise as a novel source of human-derived neurons for cell and tissue therapies as well as for in vitro drug screenings that might replace the use of animal models. However, there is still a considerable lack of knowledge on the functional properties of hiPSC-derived neuronal networks, thus limiting their application. Here, upon optimization of cell culture protocols, we demonstrate that both spontaneous and evoked electrical spiking activities of these networks can be characterized on-chip by taking advantage of the resolution provided by CMOS multielectrode arrays (CMOS-MEAs). These devices feature a large and closely-spaced array of 4096 simultaneously recording electrodes and multi-site on-chip electrical stimulation. Our results show that networks of human-derived neurons can respond to electrical stimulation with a physiological repertoire of spike waveforms after 3 months of cell culture, a period of time during which the network undergoes the expression of developing patterns of spontaneous spiking activity. To achieve this, we have investigated the impact on the network formation and on the emerging network-wide functional properties induced by different biochemical substrates, i.e., poly-dl-ornithine (PDLO), poly-l-ornithine (PLO), and polyethylenimine (PEI), that were used as adhesion promoters for the cell culture. Interestingly, we found that neuronal networks grown on PDLO coated substrates show significantly higher spontaneous firing activity, reliable responses to low-frequency electrical stimuli, and an appropriate level of PSD-95 that may denote a physiological neuronal maturation profile and synapse stabilization. However, our results also suggest that even 3-month culture might not be sufficient for human-derived neuronal network maturation. Taken together, our results highlight the tight relationship existing between substrate coatings and emerging network properties, i.e., spontaneous activity, responsiveness, synapse formation and maturation. Additionally, our results provide a baseline on the functional properties expressed over 3 months of network development for a commercially available line of hiPSC-derived neurons. This is a first step toward the development of functional pre-clinical assays to test pharmaceutical compounds on human-derived neuronal networks with CMOS-MEAs.

A portable 16-channels microcontroller-based wireless system for a bi-directional interaction with the central nervous system is presented in this work. The device is designed to be used with freely behaving small laboratory animals and allows recording of spontaneous and evoked neural activity wirelessly transmitted and stored on a personal computer. Biphasic current stimuli with programmable duration, frequency and amplitude may be triggered in real-time on the basis of the recorded neural activity as well as by the animal behavior within a specifically designed experimental setup. An intuitive graphical user interface was developed to configure and to monitor the whole system. The system was successfully tested through bench tests and in vivo measurements on behaving rats chronically implanted with multi-channels microwire arrays.

Mice respond to a cage change (CC) with altered activity, disrupted sleep and increased anxiety. A bi-weekly cage change is, therefore, preferred over a shorter CC interval and is currently the prevailing routine for Individually ventilated cages (IVCs). However, the build-up of ammonia (NH3) during this period is a potential threat to the animal health and the literature holds conflicting reports leaving this issue unresolved. We have therefor examined longitudinally in-cage activity, animal health and the build-up of ammonia across the cage floor with female and male C57BL/6 mice housed four per IVC changed every other week. We used a multicentre design with a standardised husbandry enabling us to tease-out features that replicated across sites from those that were site-specific. CC induce a marked increase in activity, especially during daytime (~50%) when the animals rest. A reduction in density from four to two mice did not alter this response. This burst was followed by a gradual decrease till the next cage change. Female but not male mice preferred to have the latrine in the front of the cage. Male mice allocate more of the activity to the latrine free part of the cage floor already the day after a CC. A behaviour that progressed through the CC cycle but was not impacted by the type of bedding used. Reducing housing density to two mice abolished this behaviour. Female mice used the entire cage floor the first week while during the second week activity in the latrine area decreased. Measurement of NH3 ppm across the cage floor revealed x3 higher values for the latrine area compared with the opposite area. NH3 ppm increases from 0–1 ppm to reach ≤25 ppm in the latrine free area and 50–100 ppm in the latrine area at the end of a cycle. As expected in-cage bacterial load covaried with in-cage NH3 ppm. Histopathological analysis revealed no changes to the upper airways covarying with recorded NH3 ppm or bacterial load. We conclude that housing of four (or equivalent biomass) C57BL/6J mice for 10 weeks under the described conditions does not cause any overt discomfort to the animals.

Deciphering neural network function in health and disease requires recording from many active neurons simultaneously. Developing approaches to increase their numbers is a major neurotechnological challenge. Parallel to recent advances in optical Ca(2+) imaging, an emerging approach consists in adopting complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology to realize MultiElectrode Array (MEA) devices. By implementing signal conditioning and multiplexing circuits, these devices allow nowadays to record from several thousands of single neurons at sub-millisecond temporal resolution. At the same time, these recordings generate very large data streams which become challenging to analyze. Here, at first we shortly review the major approaches developed for data management and analysis for conventional, low-resolution MEAs. We highlight how conventional computational tools cannot be easily up-scaled to very large electrode array recordings, and custom bioinformatics tools are an emerging need in this field. We then introduce a novel approach adapted for the acquisition, compression and analysis of extracellular signals acquired simultaneously from 4096 electrodes with CMOS MEAs. Finally, as a case study, we describe how this novel large scale recording platform was used to record and analyze extracellular spikes from the ganglion cell layer in the wholemount retina at pan-retinal scale following patterned light stimulation.

Mechanical forces are increasingly recognized as major regulators of several physiological processes at both the molecular and cellular level; therefore, a deep understanding of the sensing of these forces and their conversion into electrical signals are essential for studying the mechanosensitive properties of soft biological tissues. To contribute to this field, we present a dual-purpose device able to mechanically stimulate retinal tissue and to record the spiking activity of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). This new instrument relies on combining ferrule-top micro-indentation, which provides local measurements of viscoelasticity, with high-density multi-electrode array (HD-MEAs) to simultaneously record the spontaneous activity of the retina. In this paper, we introduce this instrument, describe its technical characteristics, and present a proof-of-concept experiment that shows how RGC spiking activity of explanted mice retinas respond to mechanical micro-stimulations of their photoreceptor layer. The data suggest that, under specific conditions of indentation, the retina perceive the mechanical stimulation as modulation of the visual input, besides the longer time-scale of activation, and the increase in spiking activity is not only localized under the indentation probe, but it propagates across the retinal tissue.