The patch clamp technique has a central place in cellular neuroscience, but it requires a fair amount of skill, practice, labor, and patience. This is especially true when one attempts to obtain patch clamp recordings from neurons in awake behaving mice. With this concern in mind, we designed an automated patch clamp system to reduce barriers to entry, ease the burden on experimenters, and increase data throughput. Using the system, we have obtained patch clamp recordings from prefrontal neurons as head-fixed mice run on a wheel, respond to sensory stimuli, or engage in a classical conditioning task.
We believe that our system, which is written entirely in MATLAB, will be useful to many cellular electrophysiologists who study mouse behavior and/or sensory processing. Our system was first described in a paper published by the Journal of Neurophysiology (Desai et al., J. Neurophysiol. 114:1331-45, 2015).
Instructions for building and using the system are available at the Robotpatch website: https://clm.utexas.edu/robotpatch. You can also get to this site by downloading and running the attached MATLAB file.