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Problems with extracellular recording of electrical activity in gastrointestinal muscle

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Abstract

Motility patterns of the gastrointestinal tract are important for efficient processing of nutrients and waste. Peristalsis and segmentation are based on rhythmic electrical slow waves that generate the phasic contractions fundamental to gastrointestinal motility. Slow waves are generated and propagated actively by interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC), and these events conduct to smooth muscle cells to elicit excitation–contraction coupling. Extracellular electrical recording has been utilized to characterize slow-wave generation and propagation and abnormalities that might be responsible for gastrointestinal motility disorders. Electrode array recording and digital processing are being used to generate data for models of electrical propagation in normal and pathophysiological conditions. Here, we discuss techniques of extracellular recording as applied to gastrointestinal organs and how mechanical artefacts might contaminate these recordings and confound their interpretation. Without rigorous controls for movement, current interpretations of extracellular recordings might ascribe inaccurate behaviours and electrical anomalies to ICC networks and gastrointestinal muscles, bringing into question the findings and validity of models of gastrointestinal electrophysiology developed from these recordings.

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Figure 1: Schematic representations of electrophysiological recording techniques.
Figure 2: Morphological considerations in gastrointestinal muscles.
Figure 3: Stabilization of movement abolishes biopotentials in human gastric muscles despite the persistence of electrical slow waves.
Figure 4: Comparison of action potentials recorded simultaneously from mouse heart with intracellular and extracellular electrocardiogram electrodes.
Figure 5: Effects of different filtering parameters on slow waves recorded directly from interstitial cells of Cajal.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Y. Bayguinov for providing the images in Fig. 2 and Y. Shen and Y.-D. Luo from the Departments of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Nevada, USA, for discussions and help with the signal processing used in Fig. 5. The authors are grateful to Y. Kito (Department of Pharmacology, Saga University, Japan) for providing the slow-wave data used in Fig. 5. The authors are also grateful to R. Mathias (State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA), D. Eisner (University of Manchester, UK) and A. Rich (State University of New York at Brockport, USA) for reading and commenting on this Perspectives article. The authors are supported by: R37 DK-40569 to K.M.S; R01 DK-057236 to S.M.W. and P01 DK-41315 to K.M.S. and S.M.W.

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  1. Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, Anderson Medical Sciences, Reno, 89557, Nevada, USA

    Kenton M. Sanders, Sean M. Ward & Grant W. Hennig

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Sanders, K., Ward, S. & Hennig, G. Problems with extracellular recording of electrical activity in gastrointestinal muscle. Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol 13, 731–741 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrgastro.2016.161

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