Adrica Kyndiah

Adrica Kyndiah received her B.Sc and M.Sc degree in Physics from North Eastern Hill University, Shillong , India in the year 2008 and 2010 respectively. In 2011, she moved to Bologna, Italy, to pursue her doctoral studies where she was awarded the PhD degree from the Chemistry Department of the Alma Mater Studorium Università di Bologna in April 2015. While she was pursuing her PhD, she worked in the field of Organic Electronics as an integral part of Prof. Fabio Biscarini’s team, at the Institute for the Study of Nanostructured Materials, National Council of Research (CNR-ISMN) of Bologna. Her thesis was focused on the study of charge transport, growth phenomena and interaction at the various interfaces of an Organic Field Effect Transistor. She was also the recipient of the BRAINS IN award 2013 conferred by the Institute of Advanced study (ISA), University of Bologna. Immediately after her PhD she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Grenoble for a period of one year, from August 2015 to August 2016. Her research activity was to formulate organic materials towards stable optoelectronic components. In September 2016 she joined the IMS lab at the Centre Nationnal de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Bordeaux, France, where her task was to fabricate Organic Light Emitting Transistor. Later that year she was selected for the BEST COFUND postdoc fellowship at IBEC where she is presently working in the Nanoscale Bioelectrical engineering group headed by Gabriel Gomila.
Group: Nanoscale bioelectrical characterization
Supervisor: Gabriel Gomila
Project: Integration of Electrolyte-Gated Organic Synapstor (EGOS) on scanning probe set-ups for simultaneous nanoscale imaging, manipulation and extracellular electrical recordings

A complete understanding of the information obtained from diagnostic medical electrical techniques (electrocardiography, electroencephalography, etc.) necessarily requires the rationalization of electrical recordings from complex multicellular systems, such as, nerves and organs. To achieve this, it is mandatory to scale down the knowledge to the electrical activity of single excitable cells electrical signals recorded in-vitro. The relevant potentials and currents such as the membrane potential, the transmembrane ion current and the extracellular potential are usually measured by micro-electrode techniques. However these techniques can present some drawbacks. One of the limitations refers to the extracellular electrical activity recording which is usually coupled with imaging systems such as optical and electron microscopy (OM/EM) . The former (OM) is affected by limited spatial resolution while the latter (EM) by environments constraints not compatible with living cells. Some alternatives to micro-electrode techniques based on the use of nano-electrodes have been proposed and demonstrated to overcome some of the limitations of the classical techniques.

Recently, a new technology for extracellular recordings on in-vitro cells has emerged, i.e., Electrolyte Gated Organic Field Effect Transistors (EGOFETs), which can work in aqueous solution at low operational voltages (less than 1 V) with excellent performances. Moreover, in the last years the EGOFET technology has been merged with the organic synapstor into the Electrolyte-Gated Organic Synapstor (EGOS), able to mimic the neuronal activity in aqueous solution.

Through different multidisciplinary inputs (organic electronics, advanced microscopy, neurobiology), this project proposal aims to integrate an EGOS-platform for extracellular electrical recording and an advanced Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) in order to achieve both high-resolution imaging and electrical measurements on living cells.