Modeling sources of inter-laboratory variability in electrophysiological properties of mammalian neurons

However, there are no standard experimental conditions for in vitro whole-cell patch-clamp electrophysiology, complicating direct comparisons between datasets. Here, we sought to understand how basic experimental conditions differ among labs and how these differences might impact measurements of electrophysiological parameters.

We curated the compositions of external bath solutions (ACSF), internal pipette solutions, and other methodological details such as animal strain and age from 509 published neurophysiology articles studying rodent neurons. We found that very few articles used the exact same experimental solutions as any other and some solution differences stem from recipe inheritance from adviser to advisee as well as changing trends over the years.