CELL acts as a multi-channel digital oscilloscope. It acquires a series of signals, performs calculations and stores the measured and calculated values in a data file on a hard disk.

CELL was developed primarily for whole-cell patch-clamp based capacitance measurements. It measures membrane current, voltage, real and imaginary admittances from the lock-in amplifier under whole-cell and cell-attached patch-clamp configurations. Membrane capacitance, membrane conductance and access conductance calculations are performed on-line. The software is supplemented with Ca2+ photometry and two additional multipurpose user-defined channels to simultaneously monitor other signals, e.g. amperometry etc.

An analog-to-digital (A/D) converter is also required to perform the A/D conversion of the signals. At this time all National Instruments A/D converters are compatible with CELL.

To collect the cell parameters used in the calculations, any commercially available combination of the patch-clamp and lock-in amplifiers can be used. CELL was developed and extensively tested on SWAM amplifiers.

Highlights

CELL software enables multi-channel data acquisition.

CELL software performs real-time calculations of passive electrical cell parameters: membrane capacitance Cm, membrane conductance Gm, access conductance Ga, and others, in patch-clamp experiments.

CELL software has a special module to monitor membrane sealing to establish a cell-attached and a whole-cell patch-clamp recording. This dispenses with the need for additional hardware equipment (oscilloscope and a pulse generator).