Recording single neurons at scale in the primate brain

Subjects

A central aim in systems neuroscience is to link brain-wide activity to perception, cognition and action. Progress along this front began with classic in vivo neurophysiological studies using single microelectrodes that revealed how individual neurons encode features of the external world. Those studies established the power of single-neuron electrophysiology but also highlighted a persisting gap: many behaviours emerge from the distributed dynamics of multiple neurons spanning millimetres to centimetres of neural tissue across several brain structures, but these dynamics could not be captured using single-neuron recordings. Tools that can sample large, deep and functionally diverse populations — particularly in the non-human primate (NHP) brain (our closest model species for human cognition) — have heretofore been limited in scale, depth and practicality. Neuropixels 1.0 NHP was developed precisely to meet these needs.

The NHP probe builds on the rodent Neuropixels architecture but has been re-engineered for primate anatomy to combine single-cell resolution with brain-wide reach. A 45-mm-long, 125-µm-wide silicon shank integrates 4,416 addressable recording sites connected to 384 simultaneously active, low-noise channels. These probes substantially outperform their lower-channel-count predecessors (for example, multi-channel V-probes), enabling simultaneous recordings from >10 times more neurons.

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