hackteria

Today we’ll continue our series of algae hacking sessions with experimentation on getting electrical signals out of large cell Chara Corallina algae and send it to pure data. We, Stefan Deuber, Ralf Weise and dusjagr, met at Ralf’s HomeLab, the best fabbing workshop i ever saw installed in an apartment, we set up the Bio-electrophysiology lab in the kitchen and experimented with the chara cells. Chara Corlline has very large single cells, approximately 5-10 cm long and 1 mm wide, and they exhibit action potentials when activated by various stimuli, as already observed be Hörmann in 1898. Most literature shows experiments with impaled micro-electrode-pipettes, but we tried a much simple protocoll, in which one half of the cell is immersed in 0.1 M KCl solution to open up all ion channels in the cell membrane, while the second half is immersed in pond water. We then measured the voltage across the whole cell, which should show us the timing and potentials, when the channels on the second half open up due to electrical or mechanical stimuli. Some info on plant electrophysiology can be found on the wiki

First results from saturday evening

chara hacking test1 from dusjagr on Vimeo.

Seems they are all dead… no action potential detected, but the measurement setup seems to work. We got to get some healthy charas!

see Stefan’s picture on fbook
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From Chara Algae Hacking, posted by Marc Dusseiller Dusjagr on 10/28/2012 (8 items)

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