The impact of neurodegeneration on the electrical activity of brain tissue: multielectrode array analysis
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by neurodegeneration due to an accumulation of abnormal amounts of neurodegenerative proteins (NP). Elevated levels of NP have also been observed in patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) which brings neurodegeneration into association with an increased risk of epileptic seizures. This study aimed to provide pilot data on the possible relationship between excitability and neurodegeneration. Electrical activity was recorded at 37°C using the multielectrode array (MEA) technique in cerebral organoids prepared from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from a patient with the familial form of AD (nAD = 6) and an unrelated healthy subject (nWT = 5). The study found a significantly increased number of active electrodes, showing both spikes and bursts, in AD organoids compared to healthy controls (e.g. differentiation day D105: WT 3.39 vs. AD 20.34% in the case of spikes, P < 0.01, and WT 1.7 vs. AD 17.0 % in the case of bursts, P < 0.05). On some days, a significant increase was also observed in the case of burst duration (D118; P < 0.05), burst count (D105; P < 0.05), or intraburst spike number (D114; P < 0.05). These pilot data indicate that neurodegenerative cerebral organoids show signs of heightened neural tissue excitability compared to healthy ones. Our ongoing analysis aims to validate these pilot results further and incorporate data describing the content of NP in these cerebral organoids for establishing an association between neurodegeneration and increased neuronal excitability. |
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