2pLSM: When will scientists stop making their own?
In the early days of patch clamp electrophysiology, everyone made their own patch clamp amplifiers because there were none commercially available. I was lucky enough to be educated by scientists of such lineage, and in one of my classes, as an exercise, we built a simple patch clamp amplifier with series resistance compensation.
Even after patch clamp amplifiers became commercialized, there were still a few aficionados who insisted on their own designs. But very quickly, companies started building so much technology into the amplifiers, that the amps surpassed what an aficionado could practically engineer in their own labs. Although expensive, the amps were affordable and offered a great deal of functionality.
Perhaps 2-photon laser scanning microscopes (2pLSMs) are approaching a similar turning point. With the expiration of the patent on 2pLSM and the flood of commercial interests in the market, including open source designs like the Janelia Farm scope pictured above (link), we are starting to see much more technology being built into these scopes.
Features such as high speed scanning and wavefront shaping are becoming commonplace. Although both of these can easily be implemented on custom built scopes, the pace of “featurization” of scopes is picking up. Perhaps in five to ten years, no one will be building their own scopes anymore because companies are selling such high tech scopes at very competitive prices.
This website is about open solutions for science, but this is primarily motivated by efficiency, i.e., not reinventing the wheel. We’ll keep covering custom 2pLSM information, for now, but only as long as it is practical. We do not anticipate covering how to build a custom patch clamp amplifier, but it could happen.
All the same, it would be great if you could cover how to build a patch clamp amplifier. I have always been interested in expanding my knowledge base.
I would also be very interested in learning how to build a patch clamp amplifier. Not really for practical purposes, as much as out of curiosity. Considering back when the field emerged everyone built their own amplifiers, I think it is useful information for the next generation of neuroscientists.
It seems to me as if the DIY solution has now become only interesting for labs who need some special feature built into their scope which may not be available commercially or which is prohibitively expensive if it is. For a standard setup, cost reductions have brought it close to the threshold of it not being worth the effort to build your own.