Our lab, in conjunction with our collaborators at Emory (Andrew Jenkins and Steve Traynelis) have added improvements to the patcherBot system in order to improve neuropharmacology screening. These improvements include manipulation of heterologous cells and control of submillisecond solution exchange to mimic the speed at which neurotransmitters are released and removed from the synaptic cleft, where they activate ligand-gated ionotropic receptors. The “pharmaBot” system can perform typical ligand-gated ionotropic receptors experimentation protocols autonomously that allows for a high experiment completion success rates and can reduce the operator’s effort substantially.

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Related Publications

Perszyk, R.E., Yip, M.C., McConnell, O.L., Wang, E.T., Jenkins, A., Traynelis, S.F., & Forest, C.R. (2021). Automated Intracellular Pharmacological Electrophysiology for Ligand-Gated Ionotropic Receptor and Pharmacology Screening. Molecular Pharmacology, 100(1), 73 LP – 82. https://doi.org/10.1124/molpharm.120.000195

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I.K. Cho, B. Yang, C.R. Forest, L. Qian, A.W.S. Chan, Amelioration of Huntington’s disease phenotype in astrocytes derived from iPSC-derived neural progenitor cells of Huntington’s disease monkeys, PLOS One 14(3): e0214156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214156

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C.M. Austin, W. Stoy, P. Su, M.C. Harber, J.P. Bardill, B.K. Hammer, C.R. Forest, Modeling and validation of autoinducer-mediated bacterial gene expression in microfluidic environments, Biomicrofluidics, Vol. 8, 034116 (2014).