Robotics for automated in vivo electrophysiology

Date

Jul 30, 2014

Time

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Speaker

Suhasa B. Kodandaramaiah

Affiliation

Synthetic Neurobiology Laboratory, Dept. of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences,

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Other Topics

Biologie

Host

Wieland Huttner

Description

Whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology of neurons in vivo enables the recording of intracellular electrical events with great precision, and supports a wide diversity of morphological and molecular analyses at the single cell level. However, high levels of skill are required in order to perform in vivo patching, and the process is time-consuming and painstaking. An automated in vivo patching robot would not only empower a great number of neuroscientists to perform such experiments, but would also open up fundamentally new kinds of experiments enabled by the resultant high throughput and scalability. We discovered that in vivo blind whole cell patch clamp electrophysiology could be implemented as a straightforward algorithm, and have developed the ‘autopatcher’- an automated robotic system capable of performing this algorithm. We validated the performance of the autopatcher in the cortex and hippocampus of anesthetized and awake head fixed mice. We achieve yields, cell recording qualities, and operational speeds that are comparable to, or exceed, those of experienced human investigators. Further, we have shown that the autopatcher algorithm can be scaled to control multiple patch electrodes in the 'multipatcher' robot, enabling whole cell recordings from intact neuronal circuits in the brain of awake behaving animals. These tools are being used to study intracellular dynamics of neuronal circuits involved in anesthesia modulated brain state transitions, spatial navigation and learning.

Last modified: Jul 31, 2014, 9:53:33 AM