Electric Field Stimulation for the Functional Assessment of Isolated Dorsal Root Ganglion Neuron Excitability.

Electric Field Stimulation for the Functional Assessment of Isolated Dorsal Root Ganglion Neuron Excitability. Ann Biomed Eng. 2021 Jan 21;: Authors: Berke IM, McGrath TM, Stivers JJ, Gui C, Barcellona MN, Gayoso MG, Tang SY, Cao YQ, Gupta MC, Setton LA Abstract Genetically encoded calcium indicators have proven useful for characterizing dorsal root ganglion neuron excitability in vivo. Challenges persist in achieving high spatial-temporal resolutions in vivo, however, due to deep tissue imaging and motion artifacts that may be limiting technical factors in obtaining measurements. Here we report an ex vivo imaging method, using a peripheral neuron-specific Advillin-GCaMP mouse line and electric field stimulation of dorsal root ganglion tissues, to assess the sensitivity of neurons en bloc. The described method rapidly characterizes Ca2+ activity in hundreds of dorsal root ganglion neurons (221 ± 64 per dorsal root ganglion) with minimal perturbation to the in situ soma environment. We further validate the method for use as a drug screening platform with the voltage-gated sodium channel inhibitor, tetrodotoxin. Drug treatment led to decreased evoked Ca2+ activity; half-maximal response voltage (EV50) increased from 13.4 V in untreated tissues to 21.2, 23.3, 51.5 (p < 0.05), and 60.6 V (p < 0.05) at 0.01, 0.1, 1, and 10 µM doses, respectively. This technique may help improve an understanding of neural signaling w...
Source: Annals of Biomedical Engineering - Category: Biomedical Engineering Authors: Tags: Ann Biomed Eng Source Type: research