Autonomous patch clamp robot for functional characterization of neurons in vivo: development and

摘要: Patch clamping is the gold standard measurement technique for cell type characterization in vivo but it 20 is low throughput, difficult to scale, and requires highly skilled operation. We developed an 21 autonomous robot that can acquire multiple consecutive patch clamp recordings in vivo. In practice, 40 22 pipettes loaded into a carousel are sequentially filled and inserted into the brain, localized to a cell, used 23 for patch clamping, and disposed. Automated visual stimulation and electrophysiology software 24 enables functional cell type classification of whole cell patched cells, as we show for 37 cells in the 25 anesthetized mouse in visual cortex (V1) L5. We achieved 9% yield, with 5.3 min per attempt over 26 hundreds of trials. The highly variable and low yield nature of in vivo patch clamp recordings will benefit 27 from such a standardized, automated, quantitative approach, allowing development of optimal 28 …