Low-cost and versatile electrodes for extracellular chronic recordings in rodents

Electrophysiological data are used to investigate fundamental properties of brain function, its relation to cognition, and its dysfunction in diseases. The development of reliable and open-source systems for electrophysiological data acquisition is decreasing the total cost of constructing and operating an electrophysiology laboratory, and facilitates low-cost methods to extract and analyze the data (Siegle et al., 2017). Here we detail our method of building custom-designed low-cost electrodes. These electrodes can be customized and manufactured by any researcher to address a broad set of research questions, further decreasing the final cost of an implanted animal. Finally, we present data showing such an electrode has a good signal quality to record LFP.