Electrophysiology Puns

I currently do research in the field of electrophysiology utilizing the patch-clamp method. If I want to pursue BCI research in the future, will my current field have any applications to research with BCI? I worry that trying to get into a lab conducting BCI research will be difficult if I haven't had any real experience within the BCI field.

I have heard of spike pops when looking at electrophysiology data (I am talking about short term plasticity in the hippocampus, schaffer collaterals) but I am not sure exactly what they are and what they mean? Is there a reason to have more spike populations in a disease model for example?

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

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Hi everyone. I'm a first year neuroscience PhD student. The lab I work in is almost exclusively an electrophysiology lab (we study the effects of certain cytokines on homeostatic synaptic plasticity). Now, as a Masters student I did try (unsuccessfully) my hand at the basic technique of whole cell patch clamp on rat brain slices (300 um thick). However, in my current lab, we use mice, and I find mouse brain tissue to be much more delicate than rat brain tissue. Anyways, here are the problems that I am having:

1. In my Masters work, I exclusively worked with rats. They are gentle, affable creatures Now I need to work with mice and I don't like mice. They are little balls of anxiety. For starters, I failed animal handling training for mice 3 times -- I seem to be unable to scruff enough skin to immobilize the mouse. Is there a solution for this? I Am extremely cautious about handling mice as I have been bitten multiple times. I can immobilize the animal by pushing down on it, but grasping the animal is difficult for me. Rats are much easier to handle for me, but we cannot do the same genetic manipulations that we can do on mice on rats.

2. Extracting the mouse brain seems to be more delicate that extracting the rat brain. Is there a good technique to extract the mouse brain? What I do is I first cut the caudal part of the skull to expose the brain. Then I cut laterally around the foramen magnum, crush the rostral part (near the nose) and peel away the skull. Unfortunately, my hands are extremely shaky (I have an essential tremor). How do I extract the brain without damaging it? How do i do it quickly?

3. On the vibratome, I seem to be unable to get good mouse brain slices at 240 um thickness. What happens is that part of the brain catches on the Vibratome blade, but then the slice slips under the blade and I don't get a good slice. Sometimes the brain doesn't even catch and slips under the blade entirely. I am wary of pushing the brain against the blade, as I believe this will result in an uneven slice. How do I get some nice whole slices, preferably containing the striatum? I personally like cutting a bit thicker (300-400 um). Will that help with the problem?

4. I cannot find my cell when switching from 4x (to see the pipette) to 40x. For whatever reason, I cannot find the right focus to show the cell. Sometimes I cannot find a cell at all. It's as if the microscope is totally out of focus -- as if the ideal focus point is just out of reach of the coar

Title says it all.

TLDR:

There exists technology to create ultra-flexible conductive mesh electronic nano-filaments which can be uptaken into syringes and injected into living tissue, such as the brain.

This isn't science fiction. (Now indicted) Harvard professor, Dr. Charles Lieber and his team have published a paper on how to manufacture and inject these mesh electronics into living brain tissue (see below for the paper, and what got me started down this rabbit hole).

I've seen a number of videos online black filaments appearing in masks and covid test swabs. See, for instance: https://webmshare.com/play/ojoGL and https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=55&v=v-wray3Nkvw&feature=emb_logo (there are many more of such videos online)

Now, whether these videos are depicting anything of concern is to be determined (the videos may entirely be a ruse, or, if not, the filaments may be nothing more than fibers).

However, the videos got me looking into the research of Dr. Charles Lieber. Now, if you don't know Dr. Lieber, he was a Harvard professor who has been researching implantable nanowire bioelectric interface technology for decades. Here is a link to his complete database: http://cml.harvard.edu/publications, and here is a link to an organization he's heading: http://meshelectronics.org/.

Dr. Lieber was indicted last year for failing to disclose and lying about financial conflicts of interest with Chinese organizations while simultaneously receiving millions of dollars in funding from the NIH and the DOD. Big national security risk.

In my research of Dr. Lieber's works, I came across this paper:

Syringe-injectable Mesh Electronics for Stable Chronic Rodent Electrophysiology

>Abstract
>
>Implantable brain electrophysiology probes are valuable tools in neuroscience due to their ability to record neural activity with high spatiotemporal resolution from shallow and deep brain regions. Their use has been hindered, however, by mechanical and structural mismatches between the probes and brain tissue that commonly lead

I'm a cardiac nurse, starting (agacnp) NP school in the fall. I'm interested in going the EP route (albeit my background is cardiac surgery) or at least a route that would utilize EP knowledge (ie cardiac surgery)

What would be some books/resources/websites etc you'd reccomend for someone with a solid beginner foundation of rhythms/pacing/acls/csu-als that would help me develop a deeper understanding of this area while also offering me practical benefit as a cardiac surgery nurse?

Basically this is a rabbit hole I'm very interested in climbing down, and likely compounding that further when I enter NP school

Admittedly, I just started up in this lab so I might not know everything I should to be asking this question.... but one of my tasks is to find (and possibly build) commutators for our rat experiments. I found probes that can be 3D printed and assembled for each of the types of imaging we want to do, but ideally we could use the same commutator for both. This device does not necessarily have to be available for 3D print, we can purchase it if we find the right device, we are just exploring all our options right now.

so im pretty up to speed with most of the computational/math shit, but im working in a lab that does both modelling and electrophysiology experiments and am currently drowning in literature.

is this simply a matter of effort and time? just keep reading more papers and looking up foundational concepts for the biology until i know my way around the literature/electrophysiology?

there's also this notion of thinking strategically about electrophysiology experiments/critiquing experimental design. i assume that's something that also just takes time?

Hi everyone,

I'm doing a PhD in experimental Neuroscience but my background is in Psychology, so I'm struggling to understand a few techniques that are used in animal research.

My current difficulties are with in vivo electrophysiology.

1. What are the concrete practical stages involved in this technique (e.g. electrodes preparation, surgery for electrode implantation, ...)?
2. What do you measure exactly with electrophysiology? Is it action potentials? And do you measure the activity of a single neuron with a single electrode? Or is it the activity of several neurons in a larger area?
3. How are the graphs generated? I assume that each electrode will generate its own wave signal and that these signals are then averaged into a final wave?
4. What is multichannel fiber photometry? Is it in any way similar or related to electrophysiology?

I hope that my questions make sense, I really appreciate any answer!

Thank you very much!