2023/11/28 by Bryce Chung, Muneeb Zia, Kyle Thomas +49 · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Engineering · Materials Science · #Neuroscience and Neural Engineering #Muscle activation and electromyography studies #Conducting polymers and applications
paper · doi:10.7554/elife.88551.2
openalex publication_date 2023/11/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Abstract Neurons coordinate their activity to produce an astonishing variety of motor behaviors. Our present understanding of motor control has grown rapidly thanks to new methods for recording and analyzing populations of many individual neurons over time. In contrast, current methods for recording the nervous system’s actual motor output – the activation of muscle fibers by motor neurons – typically cannot detect the individual electrical events produced by muscle fibers during natural behaviors and scale poorly across species and muscle groups. Here we present a novel class of electrode devices (“Myomatrix arrays”) that record muscle activity at unprecedented resolution across muscles and behaviors. High-density, flexible electrode arrays allow for stable recordings from the muscle fibers activated by a single motor neuron, called a “motor unit”, during natural behaviors in many species, including mice, rats, primates, songbirds, frogs, and insects. This technology therefore allows the nervous system’s motor output to be monitored in unprecedented detail during complex behaviors across species and muscle morphologies. We anticipate that this technology will allow rapid advances in understanding the neural control of behavior and in identifying pathologies of the motor system.