Distribution and Morphology of Calcium-Binding Proteins Immunoreactive Neurons following Chronic Tungsten Multielectrode Implants

The development of therapeutic approaches to improve the life quality of people suffering from different types of body paralysis is a current major medical challenge. Brain-machine interface (BMI) can potentially help reestablishing lost sensory and motor functions, allowing patients to use their own brain activity to restore sensorimotor control of paralyzed body parts. Chronic implants of multielectrodes, employed to record neural activity directly from the brain parenchyma, constitute the fundamental component of a BMI. However, before this technique may be effectively available to human clinical trials, it is essential to characterize its long-term impact on the nervous tissue in animal models. In the present study we evaluated how chronic implanted tungsten microelectrode arrays impact the distribution and morphology of interneurons reactive to calcium-binding proteins calbindin (CB), calretinin (CR) and parvalbumin (PV) across the rat’s motor cortex. Our results revealed that chronic microelectrode arrays were well tolerated by the nervous tissue, with recordings remaining viable for up to 6 months after implantation. Furthermore, neither the morphology nor the distribution of inhibitory neurons were broadly impacted. Moreover, restricted microglial activation was observed on the implanted sites. On the whole, our results confirm and expand the notion that tungsten multielectrodes can be deemed as a feasible candidate to future human BMI studies.