How to implement Neuropixels

Introduction

• Ideal experiment to study neuronal processing in the brain would involve recording brain-wide neural activity with single cell and sub-millisecond resolutio.
• Practical approaches towards this aim have been centered around the extracellular recording techniques, where continuous development has enabled scaling the yield from few (single channel metal microelectrodes) to few tens (wire tetrodes) and to few hundreds (silicon probes) of simultaneously recorded neurons (1).
• This article is focused on the Neuropixel probes (2), which represent an impressive recent advancement providing order of magnitude increase in the yield to allow recording simultaneously from thousands of neurons.
• Sensapex has worked with Neuropixel labs since the very beginning and we want share some practical tips how to implement Neuropixels to your experiments.

(1) Steinmetz, N.A. et al. (2018). Challenges and opportunities for large-scale electrophysiology with Neuropixels probes. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 50, 92–100.
(2) Jun, J.J. et al. (2017). Fully Integrated Silicon Probes for High-Density Recording of Neural Activity. Nature 551, 232–236.