October 8, 1998 Greetings to all the Mini Analysis Program supporters! This newsletter informs the users of Mini Analysis Program about the updates and changes in the program. Since the first registered copy of Mini Analysis Program in November of 1997, there have been over 130 registered copies sold to investigators from all over the world. The program has acquired new and useful features ever since, thanks to the precious and valuable suggestions from the registered users. We are committed to make the program THE ULTIMATE program for analyzing spontaneous activities. And we are open to any suggestions the users might have. Furthermore, we are proud to keep the price low enough to make it available for any neuroscientist. If you haven't tried it yet, please check it out at http://Jaejin.com. 1. Faster display! Faster detection! Faster fitting! Faster analysis! 2. Enhanced group analysis and curve fitting. 3. RMS noise calculation function. 4. Preference settings window adds more customizable options. 5. Scan and detect double peak feature made to go just one round. 6. More shortcut keys for enhanced navigation. 7. Other goodies. 8. ABF Utility-Add your own data file format. 9. Sign up for synaptic mailing list. 10. A suggestion for use of Mini Analysis Program: teaching graduate students. 11. Wanted! Version 4 upgrade suggestions. 1. Faster display! Faster detection! Faster fitting! Faster analysis! The major change in this update is the addition of faster algorithm for displaying traces. As most of you already realized, the bottleneck for detection was the slow display. Programmatically, the problem was due to the visual basic's display algorithm. Now the program bypasses the visual basic and directly accesses windows functions to display. Therefore, the display speed has improved at least 10 times. The same is true for the display of grouped traces in group analysis and curve fitting. It used to take several minutes to show 10-20 superimposed traces. Now superimposing 200 events or more is a snap! Naturally, the detection of peaks also got faster due to faster display. Furthermore, it added "trace display disable" option (this option is available in the newly added preference settings window) during non-stop detection for faster detection. This allows complete bypass of display during detection (10-20 times faster detection). I did a test with a 11.7 Mb file on a pentium 120 Mhz computer, running Mini Analysis Program. It took only 2 minutes to complete the detection! You should try this test with larger settings for "# blocks to display", such as 256 blocks. The curve fitting algorithm was also reorganized to make it more efficient and faster. Both single exponential and double exponential fitting got at least 10 times faster. All these improvements will make your analysis faster than ever! 2. Enhanced group analysis and curve fitting. Group analysis and curve fitting added many features to make life much easier for users. Unmark grouped events function is added to clear the previously grouped events. Users can selectively add grouped events to DataArray. This allows plotting, and column statistics on separate groups of events. With one keystroke users can mark all events in a window. This can be useful for analyzing spontaneous activities following evoked response. Annoying overflow error in group analysis has been fixed. Selecting a trace from superimposed traces in the group analysis window got much more sensitive. Users can zero in on an outlier by placing the mouse pointer and clicking on right button. Users can have an option to save fit results as a text file and copy to the clipboard at the same time. Display of traces in group analysis is 10-20 times faster. Now superimposing 200 events or more is a snap! Also, fitting single exponential or two exponential got 10-20X faster by bypassing display during fitting. 3. RMS noise calculation function. Many people asked for a simple function to estimate the noise level of recording. Root mean squared noise is calculated by taking the squared root of, sum of all the deviations of the data point from the mean, divided by total number of points. This function is available under File menu. 4. Preference settings window adds more customizable options. In order to make the program more user friendly and user specific, Preference settings window is added in order to save customizable options. The following options are currently available; -Sound On : Option used for beeping upon a peak detection. -Display tooltips : One investigator virtually begged me for this feature. He got really annoyed by the repetitive appearance of the helpful tips. Now they can be either turned off or turned on. -Lock baseline : This option eliminates the need for moving the vertical slider for adjusting baseline in the display window. You can set the fraction of the vertical scale to lock the baseline. It ranges from zero (top of window) to 1 (bottom of window). -Display trace during non-stop analysis : This option is explained in topic #1. Turning this option off will make the detection faster by bypassing the trace display. 5. Scan and detect double peaks feature made to go just one round. Automatic detection of double peaks used go round and round, taking too much time to complete. Now it is forced to go through detected events just once and look for any double peaks. 6. More shortcut keys for enhanced navigation. Jump to event number with shortcut key of Ctrl+E. This is the function if you only know the event number and would like to quickly view it. Jump to specific time gets a shortcut key of Ctrl+T. 7. Other goodies. The location of scale bars has been changed from the lower right corner to the lower left corner. Scale values also added decimals for more accurate scaling.. 8. ABF Utility-Add your own data file format ABF Utility just added a new data file format for conversion to ABF files. John Dempster's new WinCDR data files are added to the growing list of data files that ABF Utility can convert. If you happen to have a proprietary file format that you would like to analyze with Mini Analysis Program, feel free to contact us. The following is the list of data file formats that ABF Utility can convert; Igor Binary File v2.0 John Dempster's CDR data files John Dempster's WinCDR data files ELSAA Data Files Malinow's Axobasic data files Racal Heim DAT Recoder Binary File 9. Sign up for synaptic mailing list. Some of you may have already joined the synaptic transmission mailing list, provided by Jaejin Software. This is a good way of communicating with the neurocientists who share the interests involved in synaptic transmission research. If you haven't joined, please do by sending a message to majordomo@jaejin.com with "subscribe synaptic" in the body of the message. 10. Suggestion for use of Mini Analysis Program: teaching graduate students. Couple of investigators asked me if they could use the program for teaching. I thought this was a great idea. You can teach graduate students about the quantal nature of minis, different types of minis (AMPA EPSCs vs GABA IPSCs), different kinetic properties, modulation of minis by certain drug, presynaptic vs. postsynaptic locus of certain modulation, and so on. One big advantage is that you can show the minis without doing the actual experiments. 11. New version 4 upgrade suggestions. As I am preparing for version 4 upgrade, I would like to ask all of you for any new ideas. I have incorporated most of the suggestions from the users, so far. I am considering a major work on "post detection detailed analysis" feature. This feature will allow going through each and every detected peaks and measuring more accurate parameters, such as 10-90% risetime, 10-90% decaytime, decay tau 1 and decay tau 2, half-width, and so on. I would like to hear what the users would like to measure more accurately from each event. And if you have any other cool ideas, please let me know. The door is wide open for your suggestions. If you haven't try the demo please visit us at http://jaejin.com to download the demo and try! *****Mini Analysis Program is a product of joint effort by all the users. If you have any suggestions, please let us know, we will incorporate your ideas.****** For more information, visit our website at http://Jaejin.com. If you want to receive the upgrade, please send mailto: Upgrade@Jaejin.com. If you wish to be removed from this newsletter list please mailto:News@Jaejin.com. Jaejin Software 107 Irving Street Leonia, NJ 07605 phone: 201-592-7034 fax: 201-592-7034 http://Jaejin.com ftp://ftp.jaejin.com mailto://Webmaster@Jaejin.com