Intracellular Recording of Human Cardiac Action Potentials on Market-Available Multielectrode Array Platforms.

Giovanni Melle,Giulia Bruno,Giuseppina Iachetta,Francesco De Angelis,Nicolò Maccaferri,Michele Dipalo,Andrea Barbaglia,Nicolò Colistra

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00066

Abstract

High quality attenuated intracellular action potentials from large cell networks can be recorded on multi-electrode arrays by means of 3D vertical nanopillars using electrical pulses. However, most of the techniques require complex 3D nanostructures that prevent the straightforward translation into marketable products and the wide adoption in the scientific community. Moreover, 3D nanostructures are often delicate objects that cannot sustain several harsh use/cleaning cycles. On the contrary, laser optoacoustic poration allows the recording of action potentials on planar nanoporous electrodes made of noble metals. However, these constraints of the electrode material and morphology may also hinder the full exploitation of this methodology. Here, we show that optoacoustic poration is also very effective for porating cells on a large family of MEA electrode configurations, including robust electrodes made of nanoporous titanium nitride or disordered fractal-like gold nanostructures. This enables the recording of high quality cardiac action potentials in combination with optoacoustic poration, providing thus attenuated intracellular recordings on various already commercial devices used by a significant part of the research and industrial communities.

Highlights

In vitro electrophysiological recordings are a fundamental step in the study of neurons, cardiomyocytes, and, in general, of ion channel modulation in electrogenic cells
We have shown the ability of nanoporous noble metal films to behave as plasmonic metamaterials able to absorb and concentrate the impinging light radiation inside the material nanogaps
The first electrode is made of planar nanoporous titanium nitride (TiN) and is used in the single-well multi-electrode array (MEA) from MCS (Figure 1a), which consist of 60 electrodes with 30 μm diameter and 100 μm pitch

Summary

Introduction

In vitro electrophysiological recordings are a fundamental step in the study of neurons, cardiomyocytes, and, in general, of ion channel modulation in electrogenic cells. The patch-clamp concept still represents the gold standard in terms of signal quality (Hamill et al, 1981; Annecchino and Schultz, 2018), the multi-electrode array (MEA) approach has become a reference point for neuronal networks investigations (Berdondini et al, 2009) and is presently gaining significant interest from the pharmaceutical community as well (Blinova et al, 2018). Given the broad range of different applications, MEA biosensors may present different characteristics to satisfy specific needs. The majority of neuroscientists in research labs exploit single-well passive MEAs with titanium nitride (TiN) electrodes because these represent a well-established, robust solution (Cogan, 2008; Aryan et al, 2011). For higher spatial resolution needs, high-density single-well MEAs based on silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductor. For commercial applications in pharmaceutics, where high parallelization and high throughput are essential, multiwell MEA plates containing several tens of MEA biosensors are used to perform parallel screening of numerous compounds

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Results

Conclusion