Miniature patch clamp amplifier arrays
Sophion Bioscience develops custom made patch clamp amplifiers. They feature automatic compensation for series resistance (Rs) and cell capacitance (Cslow), 5 pA RMS noise limit, leak subtraction, 16 bit resolution, ±30 nA maximum current amplitude, and 20 kHz bandwidth. Sixteen amplifiers can be placed on a single printed circuit board. Due to their small size these amplifiers are ideally suited for extensive parallelism and provide the QPatch system with a considerable scalability.
100 % Rseries compensation
The QPatch amplifiers provide a unique series resistance (Rseries) compensation feature that contributes to high quality recordings. This feature allows for 100% Rs compensation. Typically, patch clamp amplifiers are capable of compensating 50 – 95% of Rs, but oscillations occur at the higher compensation percentages. The unique technology employed by the QPatch amplifiers provides 100% Rs compensation without oscillations. This feature prevents the possibility of false positives due to Rs voltage errors.
Sophion Bioscience has an exclusive license to this technology from Alembic Instruments (http://www.alembicinstruments.com/).
For more information about this technology, please refer to the Alembic Instruments website (http://www.alembicinstruments.com/) or download the following Biophysical Journal paper from the inventor of this technology
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