Patch Clamp System Design And Development Based On LabVIEW

The rise of patch clamp technology has made people have a deep understanding of the gating dynamics of cell membrane ion channels,which has greatly promoted related applications.In order to achieve more convenient control of cell membrane potential,improve efficiency,and reduce costs,this paper designed and implemented a patch clamp system based on LabVIEW,which included the design and implementation of patch clamp amplifier hardware circuits and the corresponding control software program;This research hoped to finally realize a simple and portable hardware system and use LabVIEW software to implement a virtual instrument control interface,providing flexible stimulation signals and data processing to the hardware circuit.First,based on the principle of patch-clamp technology,this paper designed a patch-clamp amplifier that could perform single-channel and whole-cell recording,and mainly included the following four circuit modules:(1)probe amplifier circuit(feedback resistance is 500M? or 50G?);(2)control signal generating circuits including 3 sub-modules for DC voltage/current signal,square wave,and external control signal respectively;(3)capacitance-resistance compensation circuits including 3 sub-modules for electrode impedance test,series resistance compensation,and capacitance compensation;(4)signal conditioning circuits including submodule circuits of DC offset adjustment,high-frequency compensation,voltage gain control,signal amplification,and output filtering.The implemented patch-clamp amplifier could perform electrode impedance testing,and had two working modes of voltage-and currentclamping,which records the ion channel currents and the cell membrane potential respectively.Second,this paper designed a software program with the LabVIEW software,which included the modules of control signals generation and data processing,so that the clamping voltage or current signals can be conveniently and quickly set on the computer,avoiding the the problem of control signal being simple and operation being cumbersome at the hardware end;meanwhile,the program also realized the waveform display,analysis and storage for the ion channel current or cell membrane potential signals collected by the patch clamp amplifier.The results showed that the patch clamp system designed in this paper gave an electrode impedance testing error of 5%;the control signal generation program could generate stimulation waveforms with arbitrary periods and durations,and iterate on clamping amplitude for any number of times with the corresponding parameters being set as needed;the data processing module realized the functions of waveform display,filtering,analysis and storage.