July 11, 2000 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. Mini Analysis Program version 5 is just released. To upgrade from v4.x to v5, download a MiniAnal.exe file from our upgrade home page at http://www.syanptosoft.com/MiniAnalysis/UpgradeOnly.html. In version 5, the file format of event file has been enhanced, allowing more event parameters to be calculated for each peak. The main window interface has been improved by adding resizable spreadsheet and the display window. Many new features are added and many bugs are fixed! The Mini Analysis Program has been so popular among the researchers (over 500 labs are currently using the program), it has become the standard analysis tool for spontaneous activities such as miniature EPSC, EPSP recordings, amperometric recordings, calcium imaging traces, spontaneous action potential and spikes, spontaneous currents and potentials, and so on. To better serve the increasing number of users, we will offer a satelite symposium at the upcoming neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. The title of the symposium is, "Analyzing Spontaneous Activities with Mini Anlaysis Program", and is scheduled for Saturday, Nov 4, at 2:00 - 4:00 PM. Please find the detailed information in your Preliminary Program. We also added three new domain names; www.MiniAnalysis.com, www.PeakAnalsysis.com, and www.EasyArticles.com. If you forget our domain name, just type www.MiniAnalysis.com and you will be able to reach us at www.synaptosoft.com. Please check out the demo of Mini Analysis Program version 5 now! And don't forget to send us any of suggestions! 1. New file format for evt file, and new detection parameters: Rise10-90, halfwidth, rise50, direction of peak. 2. Averaging multiple points for a peak detection. 3. New interface; resizable spreadsheet, display window and preference settings. 4. Enhancements in group by criteria search 5. Enhanced group analysis and curve fitting 6. New navigation tools. 7. Bugs fixed 8. Satelite symposium at SFN annual meeting in New Orleans 9. Limited time offer of our new Easy Articles Program for the users of Mini Analysis Program. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. New file format for evt file, and new detection parameters: Rise10-90, halfwidth, rise50, direction of peak. In version 5, the file format of evt file was enhanced by adding more available space for each event for other detection parameters. For each peak the program will calculate new added paramters which include, rise10-90, halfwidth, rise50, and direction of peak. Rise 10-90 is the 10-90 % risetime of a peak which are calculated by finding the difference between the interpolated time of 10% and 90% of the peak amplitude during the rising phase of a peak. Many researchers asked for this parameter, and it used to be that you could only calculate rise 10-90 in the Group Analysis and Curve Fitting window. Now the program will calculate Rise 10-90 during the detection. Similarly it will calculate halfwidth of a peak. Rise 50 is calculated as a half point in the rising phase of a peak. This value has proved to be extremely useful for the alignment of grouped peaks in the Group analysis and curve fitting window. Direction of peak is also added as 1 for upward peak and -1 for downward peak. This allows detection of various peaks of either directions in the same traces. For example, users can detect EPSCs with direction set to -1 and IPSCs with direction set to 1 in simulataneouse recordings of EPSCs and IPSCs. When you open a previous version of evt file, the program will prompt with an option to resave the file as the latest v5 format. The program is backward compatiple and you will be able to open the previous version of evt file with the latest version of Mini Analysis Program. However, the file format is not forward compatiple. In other words, you will not be able to open v5 evt file with v4.x of Mini Analysis Program. 2. Averaging multiple points for a peak detection. Many people has asked for this feature. Now users can avearge multiple points for detection of location of a peak. This feature should be useful for estimating the location of peak in noisy records. Note that the available numbers of points to average in the detection analysis tab are all odd numbers. This is because it is easier to center the middle of range of points to average with odd numbers. For example, if you set 3 as the number of points to average parameter, the location of the peak would be at the second point of the three points that the program averages. 3. New interface; resizable spreadsheet, display window and preference settings. Users will immediately notice the changes in the main window interface. One major change is the resizable spreadsheet, which now displays more event parameters and more rows of events. If you resize the window, the size of the spreadsheet changes accordingly. The diplay window will also resize. The analysis parameters and file open boxes are squeezed into a tab control to save space. Try to maximize the main window, you will see many more events in the spreadsheet. The Preference settings window is now incorporated into the main window and will be accessible easily. 4. Enhancements in group by criteria search. Group by criteria search has added all the possible event parameters to be examined. These include inter-event interval, direction, channel, rise 10-90, halfwidth, etc. The most interesting and useful is the ability to search by inter-event interval. By confining the range of inter-event intervals for grouping, users can select the peaks that are well separated in time (no double or multiple peaks). This proves extremely useful for getting averaged traces in the group analysis and curve fitting. 5. Enhanced group analysis and curve fitting. Group analysis and curve fitting now includes analysis of individual and scaled individual traces. Users can display and analyze individual traces one at a time. You can also toggle between traces in each group, allowing fitting of each trace and visualization of the results of a fit. It used to be that the alignment of traces were achieved by either the location of peak or risetime. But sometimes these two methods would give a misalignment in the superimposed traces. Now the addition of alignment of peaks by rise50 should give much better alignment of traces. You should try all three of these parameters and pick the best one determined by your eyes. 6. New navigation tools. Two sets of navigational short-cut keys are added in the new version. You can navigate or jump by a certain time interval by pressing CTL-T. You can set the time interval in the Misc (miscellaneous) tab in the main window. This short-cut key allows jumping to a specified time interval at a time and can be useful for catching a periodic events such as periodic stimulation or drug application. Another set of short-cut keys include "1234" keys which allow navigation through grouped events. You can set the number of group to be toggled in the Misc tab in the main window. For example, if have 10 events grouped as group #2, then you should first set the group number for "1234" key as 2. And then press "1" to jump to the first event in the group #2, "2" to jumpt to the previous event in the group #2, "3" to jump to the next event in the group #2, and "4" to jump to the last event in the group #2. You will notice that the location of these keys and the order of the direction are consistent with other navigational short-cut keys. 7. Bugs fixed Fixed plotting of data array when there is no detected events in the spreadsheet. Fixed Event Tag causing runtime error during display of traces. During a curve fitting, the program sometimes gives error #5, invalid procedure. The cause of this error was due to the presence of a seconary peak that is bigger than the original peak. The program searches for the peak again during curve fitting, and it was mistakenly picking the secondary peak as the location of peak. This problem has been isolate and fixed by confining the period to search the peak. 8. Satelite symposium at SFN annual meeting in New Orleans To better serve the increasing number of users, we will offer a satelite symposium at the upcoming neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Please join us to discuss the challenging problems and improvements for Mini Analysis Program. The following is the detailed description of the symposium; Analyzing Spontaneous Activities with Mini Anlaysis Program Saturday, November 4, 2000 3:00 PM-5:00 PM We invite everyone who studies spontaneous activities, such as spontaneous synaptic currents or potentials, spontaneous action potentials, spontaneous whole cell currents, spontaneous calcium signals, amperometric spikes, electrocardiograms, and etc. We will discuss the problems of analyzing spontaneous activities and compare various detection algorithms. We will detect different types of peaks using Mini Analysis Program. We will go over the tools available for post-detection analysis including various frequency plots and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. We will go over the file conversion of different types of data files. Bring your own data on a floppy diskette or a CD-ROM disc (PC format only), along with your questions. Speakers: To be announced. For further information: Justin Lee, PhD, Synaptosoft, Inc. Web: www.synaptosoft.com, Email: web@synaptosoft.com. 9. Limited time offer of our new Easy Articles Program for the users of Mini Analysis Program. We have just developed an extremely useful program called Easy Articles (Please find the relevant information at http://www.synaptosoft.com/EasyArticles/.) Easy Articles lets you organize scientific journal articles into one simple, personal database. It will let you archive the results of your PubMed searches in your own database with a simple drag-drop. It will download and link the PDF files to your database automatically. It will let you link any number, any file to an article. It will generate bibliography for your manuscript. It will eliminate the piles of paper articles from your desk. You will never have to search through manila folders for that critical article, which you happened to forget where you placed last time! For a limited time of July, 2000, we will offer Easy Articles Program at discounted price of $20 per registration (60% off the regular price) for the users of Mini Analysis Program. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you haven't try the demo, please visit us at http://www.synaptosoft.com, download the demo, and try! *****Mini Analysis Program is a product of joint effort by all of the users. If you have any suggestions, please let us know, we will incorporate your ideas.****** For more information, visit our website at http://www.synaptosoft.com. If you want to receive the upgrade, please download the demo at http://www.synaptosoft.com/DownloadDemo.html. If you wish to be removed from this newsletter mailing list please mailto:Reply@www.synaptosoft.com. Synaptosoft Inc. 107 Irving Street Leonia, NJ 07605 phone: 201-592-7034 fax: 201-592-7034 http://www.synaptosoft.com http://www.MiniAnalysis.com http://www.PeakAnalysis.com http://www.EasyArticles.com ftp://ftp.synaptosoft.com mailto://Webmaster@synaptosoft.com