Unusual problem here that I'm hoping someone may have encountered before.

My stimulating electrodes [1 FHC stainless steel, 1 FHC tungsten], when activated, generate a large number of bubbles that interfere with the stimulus artifact reaching the tissue. The amount or rate of bubble formation seems* to vary directly with the strength of stimulation.

Troubleshooting has led me to believe that hardware is most likely not the culprit (electrodes, wires, stimulus isolater have all been changed or checked) and that it may be a problem with the software.

I'm using mostly Axon laboratory materials: Recently updated pClamp V10.2.0.14 software connected to an Axon Instruments Digidata 1322A digitizer and a MultiClamp 700B, running through a BAK electronics Biphasic stimulus isolater. Strangely enough, the bubbles disappear when using V9 Clampex software.

Anybody run into a problem like this before, or have come across any bugs in the new Clampex V10.2.0.14 software, or at the very least have a suggestion on where to start or how to approach this??

Muchos gracias.

Contact Axon Instruments (Molecular devices) through their support request form and explain your problem at

http://www.moleculardevices.com/cgi-bin/support_request.cgi

If the reply is not quick enough or unhelpful call them direct at 1-800-635-5577 (U.S. only) or +1 408-747-1700.


A colleague of mine was having problems with pClamp10 and a 700B amplifier this week when he was trying to perform P/N leak subtraction on whole cell patch recordings. The software was performing the leak subtraction and displaying a subtracted trace in Clampex, but the only the uncorrected trace was recorded and the corrected trace could not be viewed or analyzed in Clampfit.
So there do appear to be some bugs in the v10 right now.

It seems you may have isolated the source of the problem, so If v9 works for you I'd downgrade for now and acquire some data.