At Sophion Bioscience, we specialize in developing and manufacturing our automated patch clamp and cell line solutions. As a result of our in-house design of hardware, software, and consumables, we are developing flexible and upgradeable solutions to support our customers’ changing and evolving needs. We provide a variety of technologies with our instruments:

• Adaptive voltage clamp
• Adaptive current clamp
• Adaptive whole-cell protocols
• Sophion software – for control and data analysis
• Sophion amplifiers – designed for APC
• Sophion patch clamp chips
• Series resistance compensation
• Temperature control
• QPatch Commander – for easy liquid handling

Adaptive voltage clamp…or ‘online V_x estimation’… is a unique feature for Sophion products that allows individual optimization of voltage protocols for each cell. It can be used to estimate the cell-specific voltage needed to activate half (or X%) of the receptor population or the voltage that keeps half of the cells in an inactivated state. By adapting to each cell individually, adaptive voltage clamp protocols give a lot tighter data than traditional V_x protocols for automated patch clamp, where all cells are treated the same.

Adaptive current clamp (‘Online  I_x estimation’) is a unique Sophion feature that automatically measures and applies a cell-specific current. The main challenge with current clamp on APC platforms is the variation from cell to cell. With adaptive current clamp, each cell can be studied independently and automatically be exposed to individual current injections. The individual current estimation can obtain a correct resting membrane potential and evoke action potentials that are more uniform across the test plate.

Everyone who has done manual patch clamp knows that creating good whole cells is ‘an art’. The unique and intelligent pressure system on the QPatch and QPatch Compact ensures that the pressure is individually adjusted for each well during whole-cell formation to provide the highest possible success rates, just like manual patch clamping. We call it ‘Adaptive whole-cell protocols‘.

Intuitive assay setup software ensures easy staff rotation and fast assay development time. Automated and comprehensive data analysis software ensures that analysis is done objectively and that less time is spent on manual data evaluation.
Data export for data integration and cloud storage is built in, as well as several export formats (E.g. FDA, Genedata)

Sophion amplifiers are designed in-house for our automated patch clamp platforms to ensure maximum flexibility and speed, which is critical when 48 or 384 cells are measured in parallel. Among others, our amplifiers support individual measurements and subsequent use of key parameters (adaptive voltage and current clamp).

The Sophion patch clamp chips are based on microfluidic principles to ensure fast and complete liquid exchange, pre-defined compound concentration and low compound consumption. Also, each well comes with two individual electrodes to minimize maintenance and ensure that advanced adaptive features are possible.

Series resistance compensation for fast-activating ion channels can help remove voltage clamp errors and increase clamp accuracy. All Sophions patch-clamp amplifiers utilize a unique patented technology enabling up to 100% Rs compensation.

Accurate and reproducible temperature control at the measurement site, within a range from 10-40°C.

Create customized protocols in the intuitive QPatch instrument software and let QPatch take care of your liquid handling. With QPatch it is possible to make serial dilutions or to retrieve waste samples for further downstream analysis.