Robotic Visual and Electrical-guided Whole-Cell Patch Clamp

Whole-cell patch clamp recording is a powerful technique for studying electrophysiological activities of single cells. Due to the lack of position information of tilt-mounted electrode pipettes, cells and focal planes, manual whole-cell patch clamp is time-consuming and inefficient. In this paper, automated electrode pipette detections based on the image corner detection and motion history images (MHI) were realized respectively under the field of different objectives lens for a fast and precise electrode pipette localization, and the target cells were positioned by mouse clicking. Based on the above work, a novel robotic visual and electrical-guided whole-cell patch clamp process was established to accelerate cell operation time by reducing the time consumption before cell sealing. The results on neurons in the V1 pyramidal cell layer in mouse brain slices show that this method doubled the operation speed before cell sealing (3 min 35 s Vs 8 min), reduced the whole-cell operation time by 44% and without reducing the success rate (60% Vs 60%). Our method is expected to improve the level of automation and operation speed of patch clamp in the future.