Low-dimensional materials for intracellular electrophysiology: advances from synthesis to applications

Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading global cause of mortality and disability, posing a major challenge to human health. Accurate, long-term monitoring of electrophysiological activity in excitable cells such as cardiomyocytes is critical for elucidating disease mechanisms, advancing drug discovery, and evaluating therapeutic efficacy. However, conventional techniques each present key limitations: patch clamp offers high-fidelity signals but is invasive and low-throughput; optical imaging enables parallel measurements but is hindered by phototoxicity and limited temporal resolution; and planar microelectrode arrays support long-term studies but yield only low-fidelity extracellular recordings. To address these trade-offs, three-dimensional bioelectronic interfaces constructed from low-dimensional nanomaterials have recently emerged as powerful tools, providing minimally invasive, high-throughput, high-signal-to-noise intracellular recordings. Among them, one-dimensional nanostructures such as nanowires, nanopillars, and nanotubes offer unique advantages, including tight membrane coupling, tunable physicochemical properties, and compatibility with large-scale microfabrication. This review summarizes bottom-up synthesis strategies for these nanostructures, top-down and hybrid approaches for device integration, multimodal characterization methods, and intracellular access techniques. Finally, we highlight recent advances in cardiac electrophysiology, covering the fundamental principles of action potential generation and network propagation, as well as key applications in drug cardiotoxicity screening and disease modeling. Future directions are also discussed, including integration with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, development of flexible platforms, and in vivo bioelectronics.