Engineered neurons interface with brain cells
- Northwestern University researchers reported on April 15 that printed artificial neurons made from graphene and molybdenum disulfide stimulated living mouse brain cells. - The Nature Nanotechnology study said the flexible devices produced tunable spikes up to 20 kilohertz and stayed stable for more than 1 million cycles. - The work targets softer, lower-power brain interfaces than rigid silicon implants. (nature.com)
Brain implants need electronics that speak the brain’s language: tiny, timed voltage spikes instead of the larger, rigid signals conventional chips usually produce. (nature.com) (mccormick.northwestern.edu) Northwestern University researchers said on April 15 they printed artificial neurons on flexible substrates and used them to stimulate living Purkinje neurons in mouse cerebellar slices. (nature.com) (news.northwestern.edu) The devices were built from aerosol-jet-printed networks of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, sandwiched between graphene electrodes. The team said the circuits generated biologically timed spikes and other firing patterns seen in real neurons. (nature.com) A neuron does not just fire once; it can pause, burst, delay, or speed up depending on the signal it receives. The paper said these printed circuits reproduced first-, second-, and third-order spiking behaviors, including integrate-and-fire, spike latency, tonic firing, and bursting. (nature.com) That matters for implants because today’s silicon systems are rigid, power-hungry, and often mismatched to the low-energy signals used by nervous tissue. Northwestern said the new devices were designed to narrow that gap with flexible, low-cost hardware. (mccormick.northwestern.edu) (nature.com) The study reported tunable firing frequencies up to 20 kilohertz and stable operation over more than 10^6 cycles. In the mouse tissue tests, the artificial spikes triggered measurable responses from real brain cells rather than only mimicking them in software. (nature.com) (techxplore.com) The same design also points to a computing use case. Mark Hersam of Northwestern said the brain is five orders of magnitude more energy efficient than a digital computer, and the group framed the work as a path toward lower-power artificial intelligence hardware. (mccormick.northwestern.edu) The result fits into a broader push to build soft, bio-realistic electronics that can operate at biological speed. A January 2026 Nature Sensors commentary described organic electrochemical neurons as candidates for closed-loop neuromodulation and future brain-computer interfaces. (nature.com) The new paper does not report a human implant or a chronic animal implant. It shows that a printed artificial neuron can produce realistic spikes, survive repeated cycling, and directly activate living brain cells in an ex vivo mouse preparation. (nature.com) For now, the advance is less about reading thoughts than about matching the physics of the brain more closely. The closer an implant’s signals are to real neurons, the easier it may be to make electronics and nervous tissue work on the same circuit. (nature.com)
