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IBB Breakfast Club Seminar Series

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"Automated Whole-cell Patch Clamp Electrophysiology of Neurons in vivo"

Craig Forest, PhD
- Assistant Professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

ABSTRACT:  Whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology of neurons in vivo enables the recording of electrical events in cells with great precision, and supports a wide diversity of cellular morphological and molecular analysis experiments.  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 experiment enabled by the resultant high throughput.  We discovered that in vivo blind whole cell patch clamp electrophysiology could be implemented as a straightforward algorithm, and developed an automated robotic system capable of performing this algorithm.  We validated the performance of our robot in both the cortex and hippocampus of anesthetized mice.  Our robot achieves yields, cell recording qualities, and operational speeds that are comparable to, or exceed, those of experienced human investigators, and is simple and inexpensive to implement.

 

The IBB Breakfast Club seminar series was started with the spirit of the Institute's interdisciplinary mission in mind. The goal of the seminar series is to highlight research taking place throughout the institute to enable the IBB community to further collaborative opportunities and interdisciplinary research. Faculty are often asked to speak at other universities and conferences, but rarely present at their home institution, this seminar series is an attempt to close that gap. The IBB Breakfast Club is open to anyone in the bio-community.

Continental breakfast will be served. 

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Colly Mitchell
  • Created:06/29/2011
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016