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 system’s motor output to be monitored in unprecedented detail
during complex behaviors across species and muscle morphologies. We
anticipate that this technology will allow rapid advances in understanding
the neural control of behavior and in identifying pathologies of the motor
system.