Stretchable and Transparent Gold-Silver Nanowire Microelectrodes for Simultaneous Electrophysiology and Optophysiology
Open AccessThe emergence and fast development of several diseases has led to an urgent need for advancing efforts in biomedical research to further the understanding of their underlying mechanisms. One of the most important bio signals that can be collected and analyzed to study these diseases is the electrical activities of different tissues and organ systems. Several testing methods and devices have been proposed to improve the quality of bioelectrical signal recording. While external field recording methods such as electrocardiography or electroencephalography are limited in their ability to provide insights into disease pathology, electrophysiology has shown great potential in recording cellular electrical signals. This field has witnessed significant progress in designing high-performance and high-fidelity electrodes. Amongst several electrode designs, stretchable and transparent microelectrode arrays have shown superiority over their rigid and opaque counterparts. While their stretchability is invaluable to enhance the compatibility with highly mobile or deformable organs such as the brain, heart, or lung, their optical transparency embraces ample potentials for integrations with optical modalities in ex-vivo experiments. Besides electrical and optical performance, the biocompatibility of those microelectrode arrays has also been a focus to realize their implementation in implantable recording devices. This project comprised of the designing, fabrication, and characterization process of a high-performance stretchable and transparent gold-silver nanowire microelectrode array to advocate for its implementation on highly mobile and deformable organs, especially on the heart. The microelectrodes show their excellent electrochemical performance and ideal optical transparency with 1 kHz normalized impedance and 550 nm transmittance of 7.46 Ω.cm2 and 81%, respectively. They also show excellent mechanical stability with unchanged electrochemical performance after 500 cycles at 20% stretching strain. Precise benchtop recording of a 10 Hz and 20 mV peak-to-peak sine wave also proves the microelectrodes’ capability for faithful recordings of real electrical signals. The device also possesses an excellent biocompatibility profile to the internal body environment. Despite some limitations due to current challenges in the field, this project's proposed microelectrode array provides a new design to the wide collection of high-performance stretchable and transparent microelectrodes. It also offers a potential approach for implementing microelectrode arrays on the heart and other highly stretchable organs.
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