Carbon Fiber Probes for Real-Time Monitoring of Dopamine

Dopamine governs key behavioral processes including motivation, learning, and habit formation. Neurochemical monitoring of dopamine is necessary to identify its role in normal and pathologic conditions and in order to identify targets for treatment and to improve diagnosis. Recent advances have made it possible to record subsecond dopamine release over extended time frames (>months), opening up the possibility to evaluate dopamine's role over behavioral adaptation, learning, neurodegeneration, and other behavioral processes that take longer than a few hours. Key innovations that we have introduced involve miniaturizing implanted probe dimensions to the size of individual neurons in order to avert inflammatory responses that can restrict chronic viability and sensitivity as well as limit the feasibility of introducing multiple probes into the brain. The purpose of this chapter is to describe methods to fabricate these sensors and to implement them in rodents for the recording of dopamine release over extended periods of time.