Dear ladies and gentleman,
I want to record ventral root for fictive swimming in larval zebrafish (4-6dpf). The most publications investigating recording fictive swimming behavior in zebrafish use patch clamp amplifier (e.g. Multiclamp 700B). However there is no need for patch clamp experiments on my setup now. So I thought to use instead extracellular amplifier that are much cheaper than patch clamp amplifier (e.g. AM-Systems).Only in one publication it was used (Masino and Fetcho 2005). Thus I want to ask if anybody has experience using extracellular amplifier in larval zebrafish?
Dear Lee von Kraus,
Thank you very much for the reference list. I already read some of the the papers you recommend me before and also contacted one of the authors. However there is still the problem which I described, they always used patch clamp amplifier(mostly Multiclamp 700B or 700A) for the extracellular recordings. Only in the paper of Masino and Fetcho 2005 they used differential AC amplifier (AM-Systems Model 1700). It is also described by Masino and Fetcho 2005 that patch clamp amplifier have a better signal to noise ratio than the differential AC amplifier they used. That‘s why they changed to use the patch clamp amplifier. However it was not described how severe the difference was between both amplifier types. If the noise level is still acceptable the use of extracellular amplifier is may be the better choice since they are much cheaper than convential amplifier designed for patch clamp experiments. In juvenile and adult zebrafish extracellular amplifier are widely used for ventral root recordings, but I don‘t know why these amplifier are not used for larval zebrafish.
Yeah, it looks like the only possibility is to test an extracellular amplifier, since it looks like there is not much experience in useing them.
If somebody has the same question like me, finally I found a newer publication using a differential AC amplifier for recording of fictive swimming in zebrafish. The signal to noise ratio looks very good.
Origin of excitation underlying locomotion in the spinal circuit of zebrafish.
Eklöf-Ljunggren E, Haupt S, Ausborn J, Dehnisch I, Uhlén P, Higashijima S, et al
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2012 Apr;109(14):5511-6
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