Nanowire probes could drive high-resolution brain-machine interfaces

Abstract

A central challenge in the field of electrophysiology is to achieve intracellular recording of the complex networks of electrogenic cells in tissues. The historical gold-standard of intracellular recording - patch-clamp electrodes - do have limitations in terms of their invasiveness and difficulty to use in large-scale parallel recording. Recent advances in nanowire-based bioelectronics have demonstrated minimally-invasive intracellular interfaces and highly-scalable parallel recording at the network level. Combined with in vivo recording platforms, these advances can enable investigations of dynamics in the brain and drive the development of new brain-machine interfaces with unprecedented resolution and precision.