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Congratulations to Lou Beaulieu-Laroche, Mark Harnett lab at MIT, and Sydney Cash and the clinicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MGH who made it possible to examine single cell dynamics in brain slice work to compare mammalian cells across 10 mammalian species in the Nature article “Allometric rules for mammalian cortical layer 5 neuron biophysics“! The work is incredible as it highlights the commonalities, and major differences, between cortical brain cells in humans, rodents, rabbits, and non-human primates. The work will be tremendously influential in understanding fundamental aspects of biophysical properties of neurons and how the human brain works.

Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04072-3

Harnett Lab: https://www.markharnett.org/

Congratulations to the team and especially Dr. Jimmy Yang, now at Emory, on the publication of our paper on the microscale characterization of neurophysiological epilepsy markers in Clinical Neurophysiology. Using PEDOT:PSS microelectrodes with 50μm spatial resolution, we found high-resolution recordings can track interictal discharges and reveal cortical domains involved in microseizures. We also found high frequency oscillations detected by microelectrodes demonstrate localized clustering on the cortical surface. These results could help inform neurosurgical decisions and uncover mechanisms underlying epilepsy.

Direct electrical stimulation, particularly single pulse electrical stimulation (SPES), has been proposed as a tool to understand connectivity in the brain yet there are debates on whether it represents functional, effective, and structural connectivity.  Working with patients with epilepsy (N=11) who were undergoing intracranial recordings as a part of their clinical care for identifying seizure onset zones, in a study lead by Dr. Britni Crocker measured stimulation-induced connectivity and compared it with resting state structural, functional, and effective connectivity. We found that direct electrical stimulation networks can reflect both structural and functional types of connectivity in the human brain. Measuring these different types of connectivity can have entirely different implications for interpretation of brain function as well as understanding connectivity relative to clinical diagnoses. Article in the journal NeuroImage

How we monitor neural activity in the brain is shaped, and bounded, by decades of foundational neuroscience and engineering. In a large-scale collaborative effort spanning six hospitals, the group, lead by Angelique Paulk, used novel high-density microelectrodes to record a set of physiological events produced by the brain that have not been described before. These events could be seen across different recording systems, and species (from mice to humans) and these event waveforms change in frequency with auditory and electrical stimulation and with the application of specific medications. These unique unitary neural events on the surface of the human cortex could represent fine scale changes in activity from within the neural circuitry of the brain. In fact, we think that these events represent a window into how brain cells integrate information as well as interact with one another in the intact brain at an unprecedented temporal and spatial scale and resolution. We propose that further study of these events could have significant implications for understanding the brain as well as understanding pathologies such as tumors and epilepsy.