Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Posters: Physics of Cells
BP 24.17: Poster
Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 17:30–19:30, Poster C
Using Scanning-Ion-Conductance-Microscopy to probe the axon initial segment of hippocampal neurons — •Ulrich Fromme1, Christopher Dilip2,3, Andreas Neef2,3, and Christoph Schmidt1 — 1Drittes Physikalisches Institut, Fakultät für Physik, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen — 2Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Göttingen — 3Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen
Scanning-Ion-Conductance-Microscopy (SICM) is a scanning-probe-microscopy which allows topographic imaging of living cells with resolutions superior to most optical methods. Its probe consists of an electrolyte-filled glass pipette as used in patch-clamp recordings, so that it can also be used for electrophysiological experiments. By combining SICM with fluorescence microscopy, specific stained structures can be indentified and imaged with SICM. In this work we used fluorescently labeled antibodies against Neurofascin, which is predominantly expressed at the Axon-Initial-Segment (AIS). This allows the identification of the AIS in live, cultured hippocampal neurons so that the surface structure can be imaged with lateral resolutions around 50 nm, and axial resolutions better than 10 nm. Electrophysiological measurements can then be done with the same piezo-driven pipette resulting in the same high precision. This way it is possible to combine structural information with electrophysiological information with high resolution. The shapes of extracellular action potentials can thus be recorded at various positions along the cell, which gives more information on ion current densities and kinetics than standard whole cell recordings.