Neuroadhesive Protein Coating Improves the Chronic Performance of Neuroelectronics in Mouse Brain

Intracortical microelectrodes are being developed to both record and stimulate neurons to understand brain circuitry or restore lost functions. However, the success of these probes is hampered partly due to the inflammatory host tissue responses to implants. To minimize the foreign body reactions, L1, a brain derived neuronal specific cell adhesion molecule, has been covalently bound to the neural electrode array surface. Here we evaluated the chronic recording performance of L1-coated silicon based laminar neural electrode arrays implanted into V1m cortex of mice. The L1 coating enhanced the overall visually evoked single-unit (SU) yield and SU amplitude, as well as signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) in the mouse brain compared to the uncoated arrays across the 0-1500 μm depth. The improvement in recording is most dramatic in the hippocampus region, where the control group showed severe recording yield decrease after one week, while the L1 implants maintained a high SU yield throughout the 16 weeks. Immunohistological analysis revealed significant increases of axonal and neuronal density along with significantly lowered microglia activation around the L1 probe after 16 weeks. These results collectively confirm the effectiveness of L1 based biomimetic coating on minimizing inflammatory tissue response and improving neural recording quality and longevity. Improving chronic recording will benefit the brain-computer interface technologies and neuroscience studies involving chronic tracking of neural activities.