Recently, a cross-disciplinary study titled "Conformal and Adhesive Gel for Stable Electrophysiology on Hairy Animals Without Shaving" was published in Nature Communications by Professor Liu Nan from the College of Chemistry and Professor Xing Dajun's research group from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at the Faculty of Psychology. The study investigates bioelectronic interface materials with adjustable hair adaptation and adhesion for animal behavioral cognition. The research was accepted for publication under the title "Conformal And Adhesive Gel for Stable Electrophysiology on Hairy Animals Without Shaving" (Nature Communications, 2026,17,2249). Professor Liu Nan and Professor Xing Dajun served as co-corresponding authors, while Yang Leyi, a master's student from the College of Chemistry, was the first author.

The abstract of this paper is as follows:

Non-invasive collection of weak electroneurographic signals is crucial for cognitive neuroscience. However, animal scalps are often covered by dense hair, which presents a substantial barrier in the scalp-electrode interface for accurate electrophysiological acquisition. Although scalp hair removal is common practice in clinical settings, it has detrimental effects on the test subjects and is infeasible in many non-clinical scenarios. Here we report a hair-adaptable and adhesion-tunable (HAAT) scalp-electrode interface that can accurately acquire electroneurographic signals from hairy skins of animal and human. By synthetically integrating dynamic covalent bonds and ionic conduction channels in the copolymer poly(sodium thioctate-co-sulfobetaine methacrylate), we implement the key functionalities of the HAAT interface including penetration of dense hair layers, strong conformal skin-electrode adhesion, on-demand painless detachment, and sensitive neuroelectric coupling. We achieve stable and precise electroneurographic signals acquisition from human, monkey and mouse’s scalps with various hair densities. The accurate event-related potential monitored during monkey vision-attention tasks facilitates the study of monkey brain activity. These results demonstrate the HAAT interface as an outstanding platform for conducting non-invasive research on animal cognition.

Reference: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70093-z