Plasticity of conducting polymer dendrites to bursts of voltage spikes in phosphate buffered saline

Abstract

The brain capitalizes on the complexity of both its biochemistry for neurons to encode diverse pieces of information with various neurotransmitters and its morphology at multiple scales to route different pathways for neural interconnectivity. Conducting polymer dendrites can show similar features by differentiating between cations and anions thanks to their charge accumulation profile and the asymmetry in their dendriticity that allows projecting spike signals differently. Here, we exploit such mimicry for in materio classification of bursting activity and investigate, in phosphate buffered saline, the capability of such object to sense bursts of voltage pulses of 100 mV amplitude, emitted by a local gate in the vicinity of the dendrite. The dendrite integrates the different activities with a fading memory time window that is characteristic of both the polarity of the spikes and the temporality of the burst. By this first demonstration, the "material-object" definitely shows great potential to be a node halfway between the two realms of brain and electronic communication.

A Temporal Filter to Extract Doped Conducting Polymer Information Features from an Electronic Nose

“…Generating relevant information, either near-sensor or in-sensor, directly from each physical device/sensing node is of major importance to lower the computational complexity of a software classifier for inferring instantly [51,52]. Furthermore, in materio information preprocessing is an essential key to lowering this complexity by the use of materials that specifically convolute signals thanks to inner physical mechanisms but also to lower the fabrication costs for such classifiers [53,54]. In this sense, using modema α (i(t)) represents an extraordinary opportunity to revise the way we build information generators in electronics, in a neuro-inspired way, to emulate it closer to the way an actual receptor neuron conditions classification.…”

Editorial: Focus on organic materials, bio-interfacing and processing in neuromorphic computing and artificial sensory applications

“…Another alternative approach to synaptic crossbar arrays of ECRAM devices, is to grow conductive dendritic polymeric fibers in situ to reproduce the interconnections in between nodes in a neural network. Scholaert et al [5] show that such dendritic objects have non-linear current-voltage responses that could be advantageously used to classify spiking signals, such as spiking activity that would be produced by biological neural cells.…”