LINEAR MICRO-ACTUATION SYSTEM FOR PATCH-CLAMP RECORDING

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Ilya Kolb, Gregory L. Holst, Max A. Stockslager, Suhasa B. Kodandaramaiah, William Stoy, Edward S. Boyden, Craig R. Forest (2015) LINEAR MICRO-ACTUATION SYSTEM FOR PATCH-CLAMP RECORDING, Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Precision Engineering.

Measuring the electrical activity of neurons is essential for understanding how they encode and transmit information in the brain. Using a technique known as patch-clamping, the electrical activity of single neurons can be reliably recorded by pressing a small glass pipette filled with electrically conductive and pneumatically controlled solution against the neuron’s membrane. This requires accurate and repeatable mechanical control of pipette position, typically necessitating a bulky actuation system and thus making it difficult to position several pipettes around a tissue specimen to record from multiple neurons at once. We have developed a linear micro-actuation system for patch-clamping that exhibits high positional accuracy (< 150 μm on-axis error over full travel), high repeatability (on-axis σ = 33 μm for full travel; σ = 0.71 μm for 15 μm travel) and low drift (0.61 μm/hour). The system was designed and fabricated to patchclamp onto neurons in a mouse brain slice. The miniaturized device presented here makes it possible to position up to 21 actuators around a 5 x 5 mm tissue sample and thus record intracellularly from a large number of neurons.