Nam Yoonkey, Brown Edgar A, Ross James D, Blum Richard A, Wheeler Bruce C, DeWeerth Stephen P
Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, United States.
J Neurosci Methods. 2009 Mar 30;178(1):99-102. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2008.11.017. Epub 2008 Nov 30.
Extracellular electrical stimulation is increasingly used for in vitro neural experimentation, including brain slices and cultured cells. Although it is desirable to record directly from the stimulating electrode, relatively high stimulation levels make it extremely difficult to record immediately after the stimulation. We have shown that this is feasible by a stimulation system (analog IC) that includes the feature of active electrode discharge. Here, we piggybacked the new IC onto an existing recording amplifier system, making it possible to record neural responses directly from the stimulating channel as early as 3 ms after the stimulation. We used the retrofitted recording system to stimulate and record from dissociated hippocampal neurons in culture. This new strategy of retrofitting an existing system is a simple but attractive approach for instrumentation designers interested in adding a new feature for extracellular recording without replacing already existing recording systems.
细胞外电刺激越来越多地用于体外神经实验，包括脑片和培养细胞。尽管直接从刺激电极进行记录是理想的，但相对较高的刺激水平使得在刺激后立即进行记录极其困难。我们已经证明，通过一个具有有源电极放电功能的刺激系统（模拟集成电路），这是可行的。在这里，我们将新的集成电路搭载到现有的记录放大器系统上，使得最早在刺激后3毫秒就能够直接从刺激通道记录神经反应。我们使用这个改装后的记录系统对培养的海马解离神经元进行刺激和记录。对于有兴趣在不替换现有记录系统的情况下为细胞外记录添加新功能的仪器设计师来说，这种对现有系统进行改装的新策略是一种简单而有吸引力的方法。
