Home Research People Publications Positions Links Potential Trainees Contact

For Potential Trainees
Lab Techniques

So you're interested in neurophysiology? You've come to the right place. Our primary investigator, Teresa Nick, has studied neural electrical properties from the molecule to the brain. The sky is the limit regarding the future of technical approaches in the laboratory. We will use whatever it takes to answer important questions regarding forebrain function and vocal learning. The techniques below represent a subset of things you can learn in the laboratory. Techniques that are currently in use in the lab include:

Electrophysiology

  • Electroencephalography (gross brain activity)
  • Multi-unit recording (neural population activity)
  • Multi-electrode recording (population and single neuron spiking activity)
  • Single-unit recording (single neuron spiking activity)
  • Juxtacellular recording (a special kind of single-unit recording that enables the filling of the neuron with vital dye after recording; Pinault, 1996)
  • Intracellular recording (single neuron spiking and synaptic activity)
  • Whole-cell patch clamp recording (single neuron spiking and synaptic activity; single neuron whole-cell currents)

Histology

  • Cryostat slicing (used to obtain frozen sections for histology)
  • Cresyl violet staining
  • Staining for Neurobiotin (Vector Labs)

Data analysis

  • Programming in C++
  • Programming in MATLAB (Mathworks)

A note on Tetrode Analysis. Compared to single-wire recording, tetrodes enable the use of relatively large wires, which improve mechanical stability, and provide greatly improved methods for the sorting of spikes from the same cell, based on the temporal coherence of activity across the four channels.  Moreover, even the best single wire records exhibit error rates that are twice those of a tetrode (Harris et al., 2000).  We currently use MClust written by A. David Redish here at the University of Minnesota.

Data presentation

  • Mac and PC Systems
  • Microsoft Office - Excel, Word, Powerpoint
  • Adobe programs - Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive
  • FinalCut Pro - for video processing