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Robot Brings Patch-Clamping To the Masses
scibri writes about robots helping neuroscientists dig into the brains of (animal) test subjects. From the article: "Robots designed to perform whole-cell patch-clamping, a difficult but powerful method that allows neuroscientists to access neurons' internal electrical workings, could make the tricky technique commonplace. Scientists from MIT have designed a robot that can record electrical currents in up to 4 neurons in the brains of anesthetized mice (abstract) at once, and they hope to extend it to up to 100 at a time. The robot finds its target on the basis of characteristic changes in the electrical environment near neurons. Then, the device nicks the cell's membrane and seals itself around the tiny hole to access the neuron's contents."
one step closer to recording myself into a body not ravaged by television and cheetos
to neuropyzine is going to suck.
mov ah, 4ch
int 21h
Who thinks this shit up? We'll just design this little nanobot that seeks out a neuron, cuts a hole in it and welds itself into place and then it will start injecting shit into your thought patterns. Like it's no problem.
Just amazing.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's a good thing that I renewed my Old Glory Robot Insurance.
Yeah, there are two of me, briefly -- but one of me never wakes up after the transfer, and the other wakes up healthy.
I'm actually completely OK with this. Maybe it has something to do with a lifetime of going to sleep every night, and never failing to wake up the next day. Discontinuity of experience is nothing new.
I don't want my brain patch clamped, thx
This is cool, but alone it does not bring electrophysiology to anybody who did not already have it. The robot only handles the easiest part of the experiment--putting an electrode into a brain and sealing onto neurons is standard practice that most electrophysiologists learn with a few days of practice.
Generally the most difficult parts of these experiments are 1) surgery / dissection, 2) keeping your animal / slice alive, 3) _keeping_ the electrode attached to the cell, and 4) managing racks full of complex, noisy, temperamental equipment. It would probably speed up the process, particularly since the experimenter is free to do other things while the robot patches cells (like prepare new electrodes for the robot).
Patch-Clamping To the Masses
1) Almost nobody on /. knows about or will ever see this technique practiced
2) BTW, it is done in vitro or in instrumented animal models, not in your head. At least not with any reasonable expectation of safety in the hands of "the masses."
3) At the moment there are essentially no practical applications of patch clamping "for the masses"
If I am mistaken, then boy are we in deep shit now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf8_tn7lBIc
I frequently bash the slahdot editors for terrible choices in front page articles (Timothy for one pro-republican posting after another, samzenpus for conservative spin that makes me want to vomit, etc), this time I'd like to extend a big thank-you to "Unknown Lamer" for his postings. Recently he posted the article on NEMS mass spec as well, so it is nice to see some science coverage on the front page. Heck, "Unknown Lamer" even posted some actual computer hardware stories recently, too - what a concept!
So thank you, Unknown Lamer. It's nice to see something that actually is news for nerds and not just politics as usual on the front page.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Hmm, sounds like someone is working for the Borg.
We got to listen and talk to individual neurons, to link to the Collective.
Prepare to be assimilated!
sounds like quite an achievement, but I was similarly interested by the way the term "patch clamp", and, specifically, the "clamp" part appears to have diverged from its original meaning.
When I first learned about neural "voltage clamp" in college, it was a way to maintain a constant voltage across a neural membrane, which is otherwise normally altered by a trans-membrane conduction event. That is, a current is passed in/out of the cell during a conduction event to compensate for it, thus maintaining or "clamping" the voltage constant. This allows for more rigorous quantification of ion channel currents than is possible under varying voltage conditions. As applied by these researchers, the term must refer to the phenomenon of the membrane patch being "clamped" to the pipette tip (ie. via suction), which, though perhaps of some interest is not as interesting, I think, as the original meaning.
The linked wikipedia article, referring to "whole cell recording" or "whole cell patch" (as a form of simple intracellular recording with its advantages and disadvantages over same) seems fundamentally accurate, whereas the abstract referencing "whole cell patch clamping" seems somewhat misleading. Intracellular recording is about events at the cell level (eg. action potential), whereas (patch) voltage clamp is about ion currents, whether at the single or multiple (ie. membrane) channel level . And I did the intracellular recording in college under a dissection scope with a pulled glass electrode in a micro-manipulator, and I can attest to its difficulties.
Robotic patch clamping is the leading cause of cyber-brain sclerosis.
... when they get a robot to perform nipple clamping.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
My first thoughts were of the robot 'Clamps', from 'Futurama':
http://ochemonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/clamps.jpg
I didn't find the author claim, no matter in the article or in the supplementary files, that they can record 4 neurons at once. Where does this information come from?
Robotics is what we need