Measuring the electrical activity of neurons is essential for understanding how they encode and transmit information in the brain. Using a technique known as patch-clamping, the electrical activity of single neurons can be reliably recorded by pressing a small glass pipette filled with electrically conductive and pneumatically controlled solution against the neuron’s membrane. This requires accurate and repeatable mechanical control of pipette position, typically necessitating a bulky actuation system and thus making it difficult to position several pipettes around a tissue specimen to record from multiple neurons at once. We have developed a linear micro-actuation system for patch-clamping that exhibits high positional accuracy (< 150 μm on-axis error over full travel), high repeatability (on-axis σ = 33 μm for full travel; σ = 0.71 μm for 15 μm travel) and low drift (0.61 μm/hour). The system was designed and fabricated to patchclamp onto neurons in a mouse brain slice. The miniaturized device presented here makes it possible to position up to 21 actuators around a 5 x 5 mm tissue sample and thus record intracellularly from a large number of neurons.
