QPatch Compact Instrument Grant brings automated electrophysiology to University of Ottawa
Associate Professor Corrie daCosta at the University of Ottawa, Canada, has been awarded a QPatch Compact instrument grant. We spoke with Dr. daCosta about how Sophion’s automated patch clamp technology will advance ion channel research, support drug discovery collaborations, and provide students with hands-on experience in modern electrophysiology.
Q: With the dust barely settling on your installation, it’s still early days, but how has the installation, training and working with Sophion gone so far?
Sophion has been highly responsive, supportive, and proactive at every stage of the process, including installation through training and initial experimental setup. Their team has been readily available to troubleshoot and provide guidance, which has facilitated a smooth transition to using the platform. Overall, our experience with Sophion has been very positive so far.
Q: Can you walk us through the first set of ion-channel assays you plan to run on the QPatch Compact (QPC), and what novel insights you hope to gain from automating these measurements?
Our initial set of ion-channel assays on the QPatch Compact (QPC) will focus on corroborating previously acquired single-channel data with whole-cell measurements. For example, we plan to generate dose response relationships, and assess recovery from desensitization, for a mutant cycle involving muscle-type acetylcholine receptor mutants associated with slow-channel congenital myasthenic syndromes (CMS). These experiments will allow us to directly connect microscopic channel behavior with macroscopic current responses.
In addition, we plan to use the QPC for primary screening of α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) gain-of-function mutants with prolonged openings. This will enable efficient prioritization of mutants for more detailed single-channel analysis in our structure–function studies. The platform will also facilitate acquisition of I–V relationships for mutants of interest. Overall, automation is expected to increase throughput, improve reproducibility, and allow us to explore a broader mutational landscape than is feasible with manual patch clamp alone.
Q: One aspect that was part of your successful application is using QPC as an education and training tool. How do you see the QPC forming part of Ottawa University’s teaching of undergraduate and post-graduate students?
Traditional patch-clamp electrophysiology is technically demanding and requires substantial hands-on training, which can limit its accessibility, especially for undergraduate students. As a result, undergraduates in our laboratory have historically relied on graduate students to acquire single-channel electrophysiological data for subsequent analysis.
The automation provided by the QPC is expected to significantly lower this barrier. It will enable undergraduate students to independently acquire high-quality whole-cell recordings as part of hypothesis-driven projects, such as introducing mutations into acetylcholine receptors and evaluating their functional consequences. This increased independence allows students to engage more fully with the entire experimental workflow, from data acquisition to analysis, and thus get a more full (and demanding!) research experience.
Moreover, combining QPC-derived whole-cell data with manually obtained single-channel recordings provides a powerful teaching framework. This integration helps illustrate how single-channel properties scale to macroscopic currents, thereby deepening students’ conceptual understanding of ion-channel structure, function, and mechanism.
Q: What new collaborations, within your institution and/or with external partners, have emerged (or hope may emerge) as a result of having access to this planar patch-clamp technology?
Access to planar patch-clamp technology is already opening new avenues for collaboration within our institution and beyond. The ability to perform higher-throughput, standardized electrophysiological measurements makes the platform attractive to groups interested in ion-channel function but lacking specialized expertise in manual patch clamp.
In particular, we have initiated a collaboration with our colleague, Dr. Francesco Gentile, whose research leverages deep learning to accelerate structure-based virtual screening of large compound and fragment libraries. In this workflow, Dr. Gentile’s group will first identify candidate molecules from extensive virtual chemical libraries (~70 million compounds), after which we will use the QPC to electrophysiologically characterize a subset of the most promising candidates (typically ~10–100 lead compounds). This complementary approach enables efficient triaging from large-scale computational screening to functional validation at the level of experimental ion-channel activity.
More broadly, we anticipate collaborations with researchers studying receptor pharmacology, channelopathies, and structure–function relationships, as well as with groups interested in screening compounds for modulatory effects on ion channels.
Would you like to take your lab’s research further with a Sophion Instrument Grant?