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."

Comments

one step closer

[P-niiice]

one step closer to recording myself into a body not ravaged by television and cheetos

Re:one step closer

[davester666]

I'm not sure I want to know how your TV has ravaged you...I hope for your personal safety it's unplugged when it ravages you in the future.

Die and leave a copy, or die and don't.

[jeffb (2.718)]

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.

Re:Die and leave a copy, or die and don't.

[TooMuchToDo]

It doesn't have to be that way. You would slowly replace parts of your brain with wetware until it was all artificial.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135207-harvard-creates-cyborg-flesh-thats-half-man-half-machine

You would then still be "you", and not two of you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

"Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a further puzzle, wondering: what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship.[3] Which ship, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus?"

Re:Die and leave a copy, or die and don't.

[MindlessAutomata]

Absolutely nonsense. Asking which one is the real "you" is presumptive since there is no "real you." there is no soul, no vital essence, no metaphysical, ontological chain of identity that exists as any discrete, singular being separable from the functional state and operations of your physical makeup. The outcome is two yous, both perceiving themselves as the real McCoy.

You guys are operating on naive philosophical assumptions best left in the bronze age with its cosmology. Your intuitions rely on extra material baggage whether you recognize or will admit to it or not.

Re:Seriously

[gstoddart]

Who thinks this shit up?

In all honesty, my first thought was of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Razorgirl.

Re:Eeek

[Anonymous Coward]

You're getting your brain clamped. Deal with it.

Patch-Clamping To the Masses

[Un pobre guey]

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.

Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses

[Hatta]

1) Almost nobody on /. knows about or will ever see this technique practiced

Almost nobody who knows about patch clamping practices it. It's that hard. "The masses" in this case refers to the 90% of neuroscience labs who don't have a patch clamp apparatus because it's an incredibly difficult technique. Putting an automatic patch clamp machine on every lab bench would be a huge boon to neuroscience.

Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses

[Un pobre guey]

I saw it done in grad school, in Mexico. It definitely looked like it required serious ninja lab skills. On a grander scale, automating such tricky and delicate maneuvers will revolutionize all of the sciences. The great 20th century scientific techniques will be subsumed to an invisible stratum hidden inside machines. 21st century scientists will use those as building blocks and tools. They will each be standing on the shoulders of several generations of scientists. Unbelievably scary, unbelievably cool.

Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses

[damn_registrars]

Don't forget though that patch clamping is useful to a lot of biological sciences beyond neuroscience. Pretty well every cell in a higher eukaryote uses voltage-gated channels for something; I've seen cardiology research groups use it to monitor Na+ ion currents for one but it goes much further than that. As someone already pointed out a big part of what restricts the adoption of patch clamping in other disciplines isn't that it doesn't have an application but rather that it is so immensely difficult to master. If it can be automated that not only makes it available for more types of work but it also increases the confidence on the measurements by making it easier to do a lot of them.

Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses

[bitingduck]

I got pretty good at it as a hobby trying to work on multi-electrode array stuff with neurons. It's not that hard if you're patient and have a light touch on the controls and can read an oscilloscope. I could do two mouse hippocampal neurons (in a dish) at once pretty reliably, and I tried did 3 a couple of times just to show off. The limiting factor on how many you can do at once is generally the size of the manipulators and amplifiers. Getting 4 in is possible but tricky, more than that starts to get really hard, which is part of why we were working on using electrode arrays for talking to neurons. I was visiting a lab about a year ago and could still do it, even after a break of 5+ years.

What I immediately thought of

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf8_tn7lBIc

Re:Seriously

[Nethemas the Great]

My first thought was Peter Hamilton's "Commonwealth Saga", or Richard Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series. My second thought was "hurry the hell up".