Dr. Colby Lewallen successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis this fall. His work focused on developing new methods for intracellular robotics and extracellular impedance spectroscopy! Abstract: Epithelia are barrier-type cells that regulate the transport of materials into and out of the body. Dysfunction of these cells is implicated in numerous diseases such as cystic fibrosis, age-related […]
Nina Sara Fraticelli-Guzman, a masters student in the lab, was featured in an article by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Her work as part of the SenSARS group involves concentrating bacteria and viruses, a crucial step in detecting SARS-Cov-2 from the air. You can read the full article here!
Dr. Corey Landry successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis this fall. His work focused on developing new methods for high throughput single cell analysis throughout intact human brain organoids! Abstract: Human brain organoids, three-dimensional spheres of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), have become widely used as a model system to study human neurodevelopment in recent […]
“I’m honored to receive what I have long considered to be the highest teaching honor the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering,” said Forest. “Since I was an undergraduate (class of 2001), I have admired the awardees and dreamt of joining their company.”
With the recent advances in deep learning enabling rapid and accurate identification of complex structures, it’s application to in vitro patch-clamp electrophysiology was inevitable. We are exploring the application of these techniques to enhance the capabilities of our fully-automatic patch clamp robots. For example, we have demonstrated fully automatic, real-time detection of healthy neurons within traditional DIC images and vision-based techniques to correct for hardware error stack-up during pipette localization.
In vivo patch-clamp is the gold standard for intracellular recordings, but it is a very manual and highly skilled technique. We have created the most automated in vivo patch-clamp robot to date, by enabling production of multiple, serial intracellular recordings without human intervention. Our robot automates pipette filling, Ag/AgCl wire threading, pipette positioning, neuron hunting, break-in, delivering sensory stimulus, and recording quality control, enabling in vivo cell-type characterization.
Whole-cell patch clamp is one of the most sensitive techniques in all of neuroscience. This technology has enabled wide ranging discoveries, such as measurements of single ion channels in neurons and the recording of electrically active cells in the living brain. However, it takes a lot of skill and time to perform – neuroscientists can […]
A unique tradition of the Precision Biosystems Laboratory is decorating a graduation cap and wagon geared towards the research and hobbies of each graduate. Immediatley after sucessfully defending their thesis, the recent graduate is given their decorated graduation gown, and told to sit in their graduation wagon so that Craig can pull them around campus […]
Former lab members Ilya and Will met up with Colby and Mighten this summer in Asburn, VA to hang out and even did a little jiu jitsu. Ilya (post-doc) and Mighten (visiting summer graduate student) were at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Will just started his post-doc at Columbia University, and Colby was completing his 3rd […]
Intracellular patch-clamp electrophysiology, one of the most ubiquitous, high-fidelity techniques in biophysics, remains laborious and low-throughput. While previous efforts have succeeded at automating some steps of the technique, we have created a robotic ‘PatcherBot’ system that can perform many patch-clamp recordings sequentially, fully unattended. Comprehensive automation is accomplished by outfitting the robot with machine vision, and cleaning pipettes instead of manually exchanging them. The PatcherBot can obtain data at a rate of 16 cells per hour and work with no human intervention for up to 3 h. We have demonstrated the broad applicability and scalability of this system by performing hundreds of recordings in tissue culture cells and mouse brain slices with no human supervision. The system is potentially transformative for applications that depend on many high-quality measurements of single cells, such as drug screening, protein functional characterization, and multimodal cell type investigations.
