Figure 1.

Recording of neuronal activity ex vivo, by means of a commercial MEA hardware platform. Our experimental setup (A) is composed by a pre-amplification and filtering (PF) stage and by an additional signal amplifier, connected via an A/D board to a dedicated data acquisition PC, which also controls a temperature controller and electrical stimulus generation (not shown). After plating and culturing mammalian primary cortical neurons ex vivo on a MEA for several days, spontaneous electrical activity is detected and recorded at each microelectrode (B), arranged as a regular 8 by 8 layout, 200 μm spacing, and displayed in real time (C). Representative raw voltage traces from four sample microelectrodes, recorded over 20 min, are sown in (D) with increasing levels of magnification, to reveal the stereotypical pattern of spontaneous multi-unit electrical activity.