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Updated: Mar 9, 2026
Design and Assembly of an Ultra-light Motorized Microdrive for Chronic Neural Recordings in Small Animals
Published on: November 8, 2012
A lightweight feedback-controlled microdrive for chronic neural recordings
A Jovalekic1, S Cavé-Lopez1, A Canopoli1
1Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland and Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ), 8057 Zurich, Switzerland.
Objective:
Chronic neural recordings have provided many insights into the relationship between neural activity and behavior. We set out to develop a miniaturized motorized microdrive that allows precise electrode positioning despite possibly unreliable motors.
Approach:
We designed a feedback-based motor control mechanism. It contains an integrated position readout from an array of magnets and a Hall sensor.
Main Results:
Our extremely lightweight (<1 g) motorized microdrive allows remote positioning of both metal electrodes and glass pipettes along one motorized axis. Target locations can be defined with a range of 6 mm and they can be reached within 1 µm precision. The incorporated headstage electronics are capable of both extracellular and intracellular recordings. We include a simple mechanism for repositioning electrodes in three dimensions and for replacing them during operation. We present neural data from different premotor areas of adult and juvenile zebra finches.
Significance:
Our findings show that feedback-based microdrive control requires little extra size and weight, suggesting that such control can be incorporated into more complex multi-electrode designs.
