Myomatrix arrays for high-definition muscle recording

Neurons coordinate their activity to produce an astonishing variety of motor behaviors. Our present understanding of motor control has grown rapidly thanks to new methods for recording and analyzing populations of many individual neurons over time. In contrast, current methods for recording the nervous system’s actual motor output – the activation of muscle fibers by motor neurons – typically cannot detect the individual electrical events produced by muscle fibers during natural behaviors and scale poorly across species and muscle groups. Here we present a novel class of electrode devices (“Myomatrix arrays”) that record muscle activity at cellular resolution across muscles and behaviors. High-density, flexible electrode arrays allow for stable recordings from the muscle fibers activated by a single motor neuron, called a “motor unit”, during natural behaviors in many species, including mice, rats, primates, songbirds, frogs, and insects. This technology therefore allows the nervous sys...

神经元通过协同活动，催生了种类繁多的复杂运动行为。得益于可长期记录并分析大量单个神经元群体活动的新兴技术，我们对运动控制的认知正快速发展。与之形成对比的是，当前用于记录神经系统真实运动输出——即运动神经元对肌纤维的激活——的方法，通常无法检测自然行为期间肌纤维产生的单个电活动事件，且在跨物种和跨肌肉群的适配性上表现不佳。本研究提出一类新型电极装置——「肌阵元阵列（Myomatrix arrays）」，可在细胞分辨率下记录不同肌肉及多种行为模式下的肌肉活动。高密度柔性电极阵列可实现在多种物种（包括小鼠、大鼠、灵长类、鸣禽、蛙类及昆虫）的自然行为过程中，对单个运动神经元所激活的肌纤维（即「运动单位（motor unit）」）进行稳定记录。因此，该技术使得神经系统...