A tiny spear made of carbon nanotubes can probe the internal electrical activity of a single neuron, giving researchers a more refined look at how brain cells respond to signals from their neighboring cells. Probing the brain at this resolution could be vital to efforts to understand and map its function in new detail (see “Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Matters”).
The neuron “harpoons” are just 5 to 10 micrometers wide and can pierce a living cell to measure electrical changes associated with neuronal signaling. In dissected slices of still-active mouse brain tissue, researchers at Duke University were able to record from inside a single neuron at a time.
“To our knowledge, our paper shows the first intracellular recording with carbon nanotubes from vertebrate neurons,” says Bruce Donald, a biochemist and computer scientist at Duke University and author on the study, which was published in PLoS ONE on Wednesday.
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