Kavli Affiliate: Eiman Azim, Rui Costa
| Authors: Bryce Chung, Muneeb Zia, Kyle A. Thomas, Jonathan A. Michaels, Amanda Jacob, Andrea Pack, Matthew J. Williams, Kailash Nagapudi, Lay Heng Teng, Eduardo Arrambide, Logan Ouellette, Nicole Oey, Rhuna Gibbs, Philip Anschutz, Jiaao Lu, Yu Wu, Mehrdad Kashefi, Tomomichi Oya, Rhonda Kersten, Alice C Mosberger, Sean O`Connell, Runming Wang, Hugo G Marques, Ana Rita P. Mendes, Constanze Lenschow, Gayathri Kondakath, Jeong Jun Kim, William Olson, Kiara N. Quinn, Pierce Perkins, Graziana Gatto, Ayesha R. Thanawalla, Susan K Coltman, Taegyo Kim, Trevor S. Smith, Benjamin Binder-Markey, Martin Zaback, Christopher Keith Thompson, Simon Giszter, Abigail Person, Martyn Goulding, Eiman Azim, Nitish Thakor, Daniel O`Connor, Barry Trimmer, Susana Q. Lima, Megan R. Carey, Chethan Pandarinath, Rui M. Costa, J. Andrew Pruszynski, Muhannad Bakir and Samuel J. Sober
| Summary:
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 unprecedented 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.