Measuring activity of the subthalamic nucleus in acute slices using multi electrode arrays

Abstract

The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (a.o.: tremor, rigidity) can be suppressed by electrical stimulation of the basal ganglia. The most common target nucleus of this so called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is the subthalamic nucleus (STN). Good clinical results are obtained by the application of pulses of 200 s, 1-3 V amplitude at a constant rate of about 130 Hz. However, the mechanism(s) responsible for the clinical improvements are not yet elucidated.\ud The use of acute brain slices as a model is widely used, despite the inevitable loss of many connections. Accurate (i.e. subthreshold) measurements of single neuron and multiple neuron (up to ~3, for practical reasons) membrane potentials are obtained by patch-clamp technique. We propose to use arrays of microelectrodes in slice recordings of STN. We present here our first results