Multi-neuron intracellular recording in vivo via interacting autopatching robots
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
- Massachusetts General Hospital, United States
- Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
- Boston University, United States
- University of Minnesota, United States
Abstract
The activities of groups of neurons in a circuit or brain region are important for neuronal computations that contribute to behaviors and disease states. Traditional extracellular recordings have been powerful and scalable, but much less is known about the intracellular processes that lead to spiking activity. We present a robotic system, the multipatcher, capable of automatically obtaining blind whole-cell patch clamp recordings from multiple neurons simultaneously. The multipatcher significantly extends automated patch clamping, or 'autopatching', to guide four interacting electrodes in a coordinated fashion, avoiding mechanical coupling in the brain. We demonstrate its performance in the cortex of anesthetized and awake mice. A multipatcher with four electrodes took an average of 10 min to obtain dual or triple recordings in 29% of trials in anesthetized mice, and in 18% of the trials in awake mice, thus illustrating practical yield and throughput to obtain multiple, simultaneous whole-cell recordings in vivo.
Article and author information
Author details
Suhasa B Kodandaramaiah
Francisco J Flores
Funding
New York Stem Cell Foundation
- Edward S Boyden
McGovern Institute Neurotechnology Fund
- Suhasa B Kodandaramaiah
National Institutes of Health
- Gregory L Holst
National Science Foundation
- Edward S Boyden
National Institutes of Health (R01 EY023173)
- Craig R Forest
National Institutes of Health (R01-GM104948)
- Emery N Brown
National Institutes of Health (P01-GM118620)
- Emery N Brown
Massachusetts General Hospital
- Emery N Brown
Picower Institue for Learning and Memory
- Emery N Brown
National Institutes of Health (1R21NS103098-01)
- Suhasa B Kodandaramaiah
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: We conducted all animal work in accordance to federal, state, and local regulations, and following NIH and AAALAC guidelines and standards. The corresponding protocol (#0113-008-16) was approved by the Institutional Committee on Animal Care at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Copyright
© 2018, Kodandaramaiah et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Multi-neuron intracellular recording in vivo via interacting autopatching robots
eLife 7:e24656.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24656
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