Construction And Application Of The Multi-channel Electrophysiological Recording System

The first stage of visual information processing occurs in the retina. Visual stimuli excite the photoreceptors, which convert the visual stimuli into electrical signals. These signals are then propagated through the retinal circuitry to the output neurons (the ganglion cells) and are relayed to the central visual system in the form of the action potentials via optic nerve fibers. Multi-electrode recording technique is an important way to study the retinal information processing. With the application of this technique, we can record the activities of a group of neurons simultaneously and analyze the spatio-temporal patterns of the neuronal group. Through synchronized recording of a group of ganglion cells'firing activities in response to specific light stimulation, we can know better on how the ganglion cells encode and transmit visual signals in a concerted way.Before we use this technique, the fist thing is to set up a multi-electrode recording system, which should fit the special requests of biological experiments. In the present study, the system was established through two steps. First, we set up a multi-electrode recording system, which owns four abilities: display light stimuli to the retina, perfuse the retina with physiological solution, keep the temperature of the perfusate and the tissue stable, record the activities of a group of neurons simultaneously and store them in the computer. Second, we analyzed the results of the experiments performed on the multi-electrode recording system, to testify if this system can record the activities of a group of neurons precisely.This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, No. 60375039): the study about the spatio-temporal coding in retinal ganglion cells set up a stable multi-electrode physiological system for the NSFC project. Through understanding the mechanism of visual information processing, this project can help to elaborate the function of population activities of dynamic groups on visual information coding and transmission. Meanwhile, this project can also contribute to the development of artificial visual prosthesis system by studying the information transmission in the neural network.