Ace Therapeutics makes it easy to make non-invasive, label-free and real-time recordings from your cell network with microelectrode array (MEA). In addition, our MEA electrophysiology of electrically active cells such as neurons can help researchers uncover psychiatric disorders and drug interactions.

Introduction of Microelectrode Array (MEA) in Psychiatry

Electrical recording of neuronal activity has been the method of choice for the analysis of individual neurons and neuronal networks. Electrodes placed in vitro within brain slices or inserted in vivo into the brain detect electrical signals generated by surrounding cells. MEA has been widely used to measure neuronal activity in vitro as a non-invasive, long-term, multi-cellular method with the key advantage of being able to record and stimulate neurons at multiple sites simultaneously. MEA can be used to understand neuronal communication, information encoding, propagation, processing and neuronal circuit computation.

Fig. 1 Spontaneous firing in cortical neurons in vitro, as revealed by MEA. (Lu C, et al., 2016)

MEA Services

Ace Therapeutics makes it easy to make non-invasive, label-free and real-time recordings from your cell network with MEA technology. We offer high-density MEA-based technology that allows the study of physiological and pathological functional activities in different models, such as cell culture (primary or stem cell-derived), brain sections (acute or organotypic), retina or brain-like organs. Especially in brain slices, MEA allows recording spike activity and field potential propagation in different regions with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.

What Can We Help You Achieve in Psychiatry with MEA?

• Study the function of neuronal firing
• Identify electrical network phenotypes associated with risk genes (many risk genes have recently been associated with susceptibility to autism and schizophrenia)
• Simultaneously record the number of neurons
• Understand brain network dynamics
• Study the functional activity of brain-like organs
• Functional characterization of human pluripotent stem cell-derived brain models
• Study the cellular molecular basis of schizophrenia
• Monitor second-by-second resting glutamate levels in the prefrontal cortex

Our Advantages

• Label-free functional imaging of large networks with single-cell spike activity resolution
• Tracks signal propagation between cells for functional connectivity studies
• Kinetic functional assays that follow culture development over weeks and months
• Improved statistical significance of calculated network activity parameters
• Accurate mapping of spontaneous activity patterns for brain area monitoring and multi-loop activity propagation
• Precise electrical stimulation capabilities
• Fine resolution of signals from dendritic compartments or somatic cell layers within circuit subregions

Ace Therapeutics is committed to providing versatile tools for the detailed study of neuronal signaling mechanisms and to improving the quality and reliability of antipsychotic drug screening or toxicology assays. We aim to provide advanced MEA technology to help you achieve faster data analysis and accurate measurements and to advance your understanding of the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders. If you are interested in MEA services, please feel free to make an inquiry.

Reference

1. Lu C, et al. Micro-electrode array recordings reveal reductions in both excitation and inhibition in cultured cortical neuron networks lacking Shank3. Mol Psychiatry. 2016;21(2):159-168.