Two Louisiana Tech engineers are part of a group whose recent paper—it’s about a new biosensor for improving brain research—was published in a Nature journal, Scientific Reports.

The labs of Dr. Terri Murray, an Edmondson/Crump Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of Tech’s Integrated Neuroscience and Imagine Lab Center (INI), and Dr. Prabhu Arumugam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, teamed with the Pati Lab, directed by Sandip Pati, MD/PhD, at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, to develop and present the research concerning a “novel microwire-based biosensor probe for simultaneous real-time measurement of glutamate and GABA dynamics in vitro.”

This groundbreaking device will allow researchers to do long-term studies of epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, and sleep in rodents. Murray published an explanation of the paper that can be found here. The research on the biosensor was funded by the National Science Foundation (OIA/EPSCoR grant 1632891).

The citation for the paper is here.

Additionally, in mid-summer it was announced that Tech would receive $367,623 in federal funding for preclinical research related to neurological disorders, specifically to evaluate treatments that could help mitigate the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). That research is also being done by Murray and co-principal investigators Arumugam and Dr. Jeoung Soo Lee, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Last year they evaluated the effects of treating mice with only minocycline after a traumatic brain injury; the new grant will expand upon this original work, which will use the microwire-based biosensors. That paper can be found here.