Previous research rcvealed that distortion is detected in transient voltage signal recorded with traditional patch clamp amplifier under current clamp mode, which is essentially resulted by electronic design of the headstage of the patch clamp. A new kind of headstage is designed to modify the defect, the circuit of which not only measures the transient potentials as the classical voltage follower does but also is quite suitable for the standard voltage-clamp mode. Furthermore, the technique of voltage-clamp-controlled current-clamp is applied for modifying the conventional patch-clamp amplifier, the variable low-pass filter is added into the circuit to reduce the response speed of voltage-clamp module, thus the transient potentials changes can be measured while membrane potential is kept at a constant value. Bridge balance circuitry is designed to eliminate the voltage drop while the variable current injected into the electrode. And fast capacitance compensation stage of conventional PCA is modified to nentralize the capacitance and accelerate system response speed for current-clamp mode. The experirnental results on cell model demonstrate that modified PCA meets the rcquirement of monitoring transient potential changes in electrophysiology research.

A USB bus based data interface technology for full auto Patch-Clamp system is discussed in the article. The main controller is CY2131QC (Cypress) and the logic controller is EPM3256A (Altera). Optocouplers are used to get rid of the noise from the interface. It makes the installation of the Patch-Clamp system easier by using the USB bus, and is suitable for the new generation of the Patch-Clamp system with a high speed of 1M bytes/s.
Computer-Aided Design ; Equipment Design ; Patch-Clamp Techniques ; instrumentation ; methods