The Allen Institute for Brain Science has announced a joint effort with imec, a Belgian nanoelectronics research center, to develop and manufacture a state-of-the-art sensor array for recording neural activity in animal brains.

Backed by $5.5 million in funding from the Allen Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and University College London, the initiative will work to advance current neural probe technology used to detect extracellular electrical activity in the brain. "We're launching this project because current methods for studying brain activity are inadequate," said Tim Harris, director of the Applied Physics and Instrumentation Group at HHMI's Janelia Farm Research Campus. "We are committed to creating better tools that will enable us to collect better quality data and reduce the number of animals that are needed for this essential research."

Engineers at imec will work to develop sensor arrays that incorporate recording electrodes at a much higher density and provide an order of magnitude better performance than existing technology, enabling researchers to record brain activity with an unprecedented combination of resolution and the ability to record from a large number of sites within the brain. The new probes will address basic brain function, such as how sensory information and visual images flow into and between brain regions and are processed by the cortex.

"The advanced microelectronics built and tested by our consortium will enable any neuroscientist to pick up with ease, using a single piece of machined silicon, the electrical signals generated by hundreds of individual nerve cells," said Allen Institute chief scientific officer Christof Koch, Ph.D. "With this advanced tool we can listen to their chattering, bringing us closer to the day when we will fully decipher their meaning and thereby understand the language of the brain."