Authors: Blanca Martin-Burgos, Trevor Supan McPherson, Ryan Hammonds, Richard Gao, Alysson R. Muotri, and Bradley Voytek
Journal of Neurophysiology, 17 Jul 2024
Scientists use Maestro MEA to explore neural activity in cortical organoids and rodent hippocampal neurons over time.
Complex cognition requires maintaining vast amounts of information. Neuronal timescales, defined as the duration that neural activity in a population persists, reflect the capacity of neural circuits to process and maintain information over time. Growing evidence suggests that neuronal timescales play an important role in cognitive function, but how these timescales develop and change over time is not well understood. In this study, scientists use human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cortical organoids and rodent hippocampal neurons to study the developmental trajectory of neuronal timescales across different species. To assess timescale development over time in the two models, the team used Axion’s noninvasive Maestro MEA to record electrophysiological activity in vitro. Overall, the authors demonstrated that “neuronal timescales develop in a non-linear fashion in human cortical organoids, which is partially replicated in dissociated rat hippocampus cultures,” and suggest that this fluctuation “might be an important developmental feature that reflects the changing complexity and information capacity in developing neuronal circuits.”
