Abstract
Real-time monitoring of extracellular neurotransmitter concentration offers great benefits for diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders and diseases. This paper presents the study design and results of a miniaturized and wireless optical neurotransmitter sensor (MWONS) for real-time monitoring of brain dopamine concentration. MWONS is based on fluorescent sensing principles and comprises a microspectrometer unit, a microcontroller for data acquisition, and a Bluetooth wireless network for real-time monitoring. MWONS has a custom-designed application software that controls the operation parameters for excitation light sources, data acquisition, and signal processing. MWONS successfully demonstrated a measurement capability with a limit of detection down to a 100 nanomole dopamine concentration, and high selectivity to ascorbic acid (90:1) and uric acid (36:1).
Highlights
Real-time sensing of dopamine (3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) (DA) activity in the brain is critically important to understand neural behavior and to develop therapeutic intervention technologies for neurological disorders and diseases
Phasic release of DA reflects the burst activity of firing neurons and is regulated by glutamergic excitatory synaptic drive from other brain areas, including the pedunculopontine tegmentum (PPTg) and the subthalamic nucleus (SN) [2,3,4,5]
We previously presented a preliminary design of an optical dopamine sensing system, measured its outputs, and characterized its response [28,29]
Summary
Real-time sensing of dopamine (3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine) (DA) activity in the brain is critically important to understand neural behavior and to develop therapeutic intervention technologies for neurological disorders and diseases. DA concentration in the extracellular space of brain tissues varies depending on both tonic and phasic dopamine release mechanisms [1]. Tonic dopamine release results from spontaneous single spikes in DA neurons, with a concentration of a few tens of nanomoles (e.g., 10–20 nM within the striatal region [2]), depending on the number of DA neurons responding during spontaneous spike activities. There have been many different types of dopamine sensing technology using electrical and optical sensing principles. Among these multiple neural sensing methods, electrical sensing of neurotransmitters was carried out with amperometry and voltammetry methods.
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