Twister3: a simple and fast microwire twister
Name
Newman_2020_J._Neural_Eng._17_026040.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
22.53 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5da00866be4bbea69261f1266ee5dc4e
Author(s)
Newman, Jonathan P
Voigts, Jakob
Borius, Maxim
Karlsson, Mattias
Harnett, Mark T
Wilson, Matthew A
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Journal of Neural Engineering
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 IOP Publishing Ltd. Objective. Twisted wire probes (TWPs, e.g. stereotrodes and tetrodes) provide a cheap and reliable method for obtaining high quality, multiple single-unit neural recordings in freely moving animals. Despite their ubiquity, TWPs are constructed using a tedious procedure consisting of manually folding, turning, and fusing microwire. This imposes a significant labor burden on research personnel who use TWPs in their experiments. Approach. To address this issue, we created Twister3, an open-source microwire twisting machine. This machine features a quick-draw wire feeder that eliminates manual wire folding, an auto-aligning motor attachment mechanism which results in consistently straight probes, and a high speed motor for rapid probe turning. Main results. Twister3 greatly increases the speed and repeatability of constructing twisted microwire probes compared to existing options. Users with less than one hour of experience using the device were able to make ∼70 tetrodes per hour, on average. It is cheap, well documented, and all associated designs and source code are open-source. Significance. Twister3 significantly reduces the labor burden of creating high-quality TWPs so electrophysiologists can spend more of their time performing recordings rather than making probes. Therefore, this device is of interest to any lab performing TWP neural recordings, for example, using microdrives.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
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/AB77FA
