Patch-walking, a coordinated multi-pipette patch clamp for efficiently finding synaptic connections.

ABSTRACT: Significant technical challenges exist when measuring synaptic connections between neurons in living brain tissue. The patch clamping technique, when used to probe for synaptic connections, is manually laborious and time-consuming. To improve its efficiency, we pursued another approach: instead of retracting all patch clamping electrodes after each recording attempt, we cleaned just one of them and reused it to obtain another recording while maintaining the others. With one new patch clamp recording attempt, many new connections can be probed. By placing one pipette in front of the others in this way, one can 'walk' across the mouse brain slice, termed 'patch-walking.' We performed 136 patch clamp attempts for two pipettes, achieving 71 successful whole cell recordings (52.2%). Of these, w

SUBMITTER: Yip MC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11573346 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature