title: Automatic analysis for amperometrical recordings of exocytosis.
abstract: Amperometry is a widely used technique for monitoring the secretion of catecholamines (CA) by exocytosis. The use of carbon fibre microelectrodes allows the on-line recording of CA released from a single secretory vesicle. Amperometric signals are generated by oxidation of the quantally released CA close to the electrode tip. Each event of exocytosis is called a secretory spike. Here we describe a program written for IGOR (Wavemetrics, Lake Oswego, OR, USA), which may be used to analyze amperometric signals off-line. The procedures allow, (i) digital filtering and analysis of the current noise, spike identification and calculation of spike kinetic parameters; (ii) spike review; (iii) pooling spikes and data to create galleries, tables and histograms of measured parameters which can be exported to a graphic format or files for further analysis.
authors.affiliation: Unidad de Farmacología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Segura
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Brioso
authors.forename: J F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Gómez
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Machado
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Borges
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000313:Adrenal Medulla / Q000166:cytology / Q000378:metabolism; D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D002395:Catecholamines / Q000378:metabolism*; D002417:Cattle; D019439:Chromaffin Cells / Q000166:cytology / Q000378:metabolism; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D005089:Exocytosis / Q000502:physiology*; D008839:Microelectrodes / Q000592:standards*; D008959:Models, Neurological; D022142:Secretory Vesicles / Q000378:metabolism* / Q000648:ultrastructure; D012984:Software / Q000592:standards*
chemical_list: D002395:Catecholamines