Samuel Sober
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Every movement we make, from a step to a song, comes down to commands that the nervous system sends to muscles. Tools for recording brain activity have advanced quickly.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
- Topics
electromyography
Myomatrix arrays
motor units
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Design new Myomatrix electrode arrays that record single motor unit activity from a wide range of species, body sizes and muscle types. The design builds on earlier arrays used in mice and songbirds.
- Develop devices that combine high-resolution muscle recording with electrical or optogenetic (light-based) manipulation of motor and sensory signals in the peripheral nervous system.
- Establish low-cost fabrication methods for these high-resolution muscle sensors so they can be widely adopted across the neuroscience community.
More about the research
Tools for measuring and controlling the motor output that actually reaches the muscles have lagged far behind. Movement is controlled through motor units, each made of one motor neuron and the muscle fibers it triggers. Each electrical spike in a motor neuron produces a spike in its muscle fibers. This means muscle recordings can reveal what individual neurons in the spinal cord and brainstem are doing. Standard fine-wire electromyography (EMG), which records the electrical activity of muscles, usually cannot separate single motor units. It also works only on a few large, easy-to-reach muscles.
Why it matters
Recording and controlling the signals the nervous system sends to muscles is basic to understanding how the brain produces behavior. These tools could help researchers study both healthy and disordered nervous system function, including motor control problems, across many animal species. Low-cost fabrication would make high-resolution muscle recording available to many more laboratories.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sabhya Rana
Ohio State University, OH·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop an effective transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation protocol that increases phrenic nerve activation after cervical spinal cord injury in rats, using controlled neurophysiological nerve recordings.
Lee Miller
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Build decoders that predict intended muscle activity (EMG) from primary motor cortex spiking recorded in humans with high-level spinal cord injury, trained with EMG, hand posture and force data from able-bodied people doing the same actions.
Kenneth Weber
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Improve spinal cord functional MRI with a 64-channel head-neck coil, segment-based alignment of scans and surface electromyography (muscle recordings) to remove motion noise, while mapping how the cord encodes touch intensity in 30 volunteers.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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