Multi-patch throughput doubled

Introduction

• Multiple patch-clamp recordings are the gold standard method to investigate information processing in neural circuits at the sub-cellular resolution.
• Forming a giga seal for the whole-cell recording requires pristine pipette tip: traditionally pipette is changed after each recording and/or its attempt
• In theory, circuit study throughput scales non-linearly according to n×(n−1), where n is number of simultaneously recorded cells
• In practise, yield saturates gradually due to loss of cells from prolonged experiment duration and manual pipette change related movement artifacts
• 74 % increase in multi-patch throughput was recently presented by Dr. Peng and his co-workers thanks to the automated pipette cleaning technique (1)
• This application note presents some of the high-lights with focus on the practical implementation of the pipette cleaning.

(1) Peng Y et al. High-throughput microcircuit analysis of individual human brains through next-generation multineuron patch-clamp. Elife. 2019 Nov 19;8. pii: e48178.