Research On New Electrodes For Patch Clamp Technology

Nowadays, the patch-clamp is widely used for the research of cell biology, high-throughput and automation for the patch-clamp technique become inevitable trend of development. The conventional patch-clamp micropipette electrode technique, which can properly record the electrical signal of cellular ionic channels, but it suffers from laborious, manual processing by highly skilled workers and has extremely low throughput. Designing new electrode technique is very important for modern patch-clamp measurement to achieve high-throughput and automation.This thesis briefly reviewed the major technology about conventional patch-clamp micropipette electrode, introduced some new patch-clamp electrode chip products, which automate patch clamping by either automating conventional micropipette-based patch clamping or developing planar microelectrode arrays. Discussing the technical details, advantages and disadvantages of "CytoCentering" and "Flip-the-Tip" technique is helpful to design the new patch-clamp micropipette electrode technique. A new type of the patch-clamp micropipette electrode system has been designed, and its parameters and experimental assembly and operational processes were described in this thesis. Some cell experiments has been done under the system.Based on theoretical research and empirical evidence, the new patch-clamp micropipette electrode system has been good at displacement controlling and gigasealing for cells, but it is necessary to do more experiments for automatically sucking and breaking the plasma membrane and recording the currents of cellular ionic channels.