ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Neurosci.
Sec. Cellular Neurophysiology
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fncel.2025.1598016
A novel method for reliably measuring miniature and spontaneous postsynaptic events in whole-cell patch clamp recordings in the central nervous system
Provisionally accepted
- Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Measurements of miniature postsynaptic currents (mPSCs) or potentials (mPSPs) in the soma of neurons of the central nervous system (CNS) provide a way of quantifying the synaptic function at the network level and, therefore, are routine in the neurophysiology literature. These miniature responses (or minis) are thought to be elicited by the spontaneous release of a single neurotransmitter vesicle, also called a quantum. As such, their measurement at the soma can potentially offer a technically straightforward way of estimating ‘quantal sizes’ of central synapses. However, popular methods for detecting minis in whole-cell recordings fall short of being able to reliably distinguish them from background physiological noise. This issue has received very limited attention in the literature, and its scope as well as the relative performance of existing algorithms have not been quantified. As a result, solutions for reliably measuring the quantal size in somatic recordings also do not exist. As the first step in proposing and testing a potential solution, we developed and described a novel miniature postsynaptic event detection algorithm as part of our quantal analysis software called ‘minis’. We tested its performance in detecting real and simulated minis in whole-cell recordings from pyramidal neurons in rat neocortical slices and compared it to two of the most-used mini detection algorithms. This benchmarking revealed superior detection by our algorithm. The release version of the algorithm also offers great flexibility via graphical and programming interfaces.
Keywords: miniature post-synaptic potential/current, Mpsp, MPSC, mEPSP, mEPSC, single vesicle release, Quantal release, mini detection
Received: 22 Mar 2025; Accepted: 29 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dervinis and Major. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Martynas Dervinis, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.