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."

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: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.

Thank you to Unknown Lamer

[damn_registrars]

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.

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.