A system to provide control of stimulation and acquisition of ionic currents in cell membranes [In: Proceedings of the physiological society p. 7]

Bevan, S., Chad, J.E., Hollowood, F.S. and Wise, J.C.M. (1986) A system to provide control of stimulation and acquisition of ionic currents in cell membranes [In: Proceedings of the physiological society p. 7]. Journal of Physiology, 377.

Abstract

A program has been developed which controls the electrical stimulation of cell membranes with concurrent acquisition of the induced ionic currents. The software is written for a Cambridge Electronic Design (CED) type 1401 Intelligent LaboratoryInterface driven by a Sperry model 45 personal computer, which is highly compatible with the IBM XT.
The CED 1401 is a sophisticated and flexible instrument that contains its own 6502 microprocessor and directly addressable 64 K memory, with up to 2 Mbytes of extra memory. Our software requires at least 0-25 Mbytes of this extra memory and uses (1) the digital-to-analogue (12-bit) capability to produce stimulus wave forms of programmable shape, (2) the analogue-to-digital converters (12 bit) to sample theevoked responses and (3) the internal 1401 clocks to control the timing of this stimulation and acquisition, and also to provide synchronization with other experimental apparatus. These features and others may all be used concurrently.
The program is menu-driven; keyboard input is subject to extensive error trapping and run-time interaction with the system is achieved by use of function keys. A 'spreadsheet' format is used to input the variables defining the stimulus wave forms which can be stored on disk for subsequent use. Interactive control menus available during the experiment permit rapid retrieval of these sets of variables to suit current- or voltage-clamp experiments or to generate repetitive pulses which, for example,may be used to test for seal formation between a patch electrode and the cell membrane.
A comprehensive range of sampling frequencies, up to 32 K conversions/s, are selectable. 'Windows' of 512-2048 points may be used to store selected portions of the evoked responses for subsequent display and analysis. Data with experimental details may also be stored on disk.
The system was designed, developed and documented using the Jackson system of program development (Jackson, 1975; Giddings, 1984) and uses Pascal as thehigh-level language. This approach permits the program to be modified to meet the needs of the experimenter while maintaining a strict regime of modular program development.

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Contributors

Author: J.E. Chad

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