PatcherBot: a single-cell electrophysiology robot for adherent cells and brain slices
Name
nihms-1570561.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.57 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
68f610a83a872f985d32ec5846136b70
Author(s)
Kolb, Ilya
Landry, Corey R
Yip, Mighten C
Lewallen, Colby F
Stoy, William A
Lee, John
Felouzis, Amanda
Yang, Bo
Boyden, Edward
Rozell, Christopher J
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Journal of Neural Engineering
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2019 IOP Publishing Ltd. Objective. Intracellular patch-clamp electrophysiology, one of the most ubiquitous, high-fidelity techniques in biophysics, remains laborious and low-throughput. While previous efforts have succeeded at automating some steps of the technique, here we demonstrate a robotic 'PatcherBot' system that can perform many patch-clamp recordings sequentially, fully unattended. Approach. Comprehensive automation is accomplished by outfitting the robot with machine vision, and cleaning pipettes instead of manually exchanging them. Main results. the PatcherBot can obtain data at a rate of 16 cells per hour and work with no human intervention for up to 3 h. We demonstrate the broad applicability and scalability of this system by performing hundreds of recordings in tissue culture cells and mouse brain slices with no human supervision. Using the PatcherBot, we also discovered that pipette cleaning can be improved by a factor of three. Significance. The system is potentially transformative for applications that depend on many high-quality measurements of single cells, such as drug screening, protein functional characterization, and multimodal cell type investigations.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/AB1834
