July 25, 2001 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. It has been a while since the last newsletter in Nov 2000. Many things happened since then. We have new mailing address now. Please check our new contact info at the bottom. We have added two new programs in our product listing, Easy Articles and Channelab. Easy Articles is a very useful program for organizing PDF files. Channelab is a single channel kinetic modeling, simulation, ananlsys program developed by Dr. Stephen Traynelis. Mini Analysis has gained its momentum in number of appearances in major journal articles. So far over 100 journal articles in top journals have referenced Mini Analysis Program. Mini Analysis Program version 5.3 is just released. To upgrade from v4.x or v5.X to v5.3, download a MiniAnal.exe file from our upgrade home page at http://www.syanptosoft.com/MiniAnalysis/UpgradeOnly.html. The Most exciting features in version 5.3 includes new sophisticated burst analysis functions and the initiation of noise analysis. Please check out the demo of Mini Analysis Program version 5.3 now! 1. Satelite Symposium, Saturday, Nov 10, at 3:00 - 5:00 PM, San Diego. 2. Sophisticated Burst Analysis 3. ABF Utility: convert many more files 4. Noise Analysis 5. Compare by Group 6. Improvements in Group Analysis 7. New Display functions in Main Window 8. Bugs fixed 9. Lab site license 10. Too many references to list. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Satelite Symposium, Saturday, Nov 4, at 3:00 - 5:00 PM, New Orleans. Title: Analyzing Spontaneous Activities with Mini Analysis Program and Single Channel Kinetics with Channelab Date: 11/10/01 (November 10, 2001) Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Setup: 100 people Please find more information in your Preliminary Program. The last year's symposium was a great success with close to 100 attendees. Thanks for all of your support. This year the symposium will be divided into two parts. In the first part, Justin Lee will discuss the new features of Mini Analysis Program. And in the second part, Steve Traynelis will go over the features of Channelab, our single channel analysis and modeling program. After the presentation, Justin Lee will remain in the room to answer any further questions in person. If you have a specific questions and would like to arrange a meeting with Justin Lee please send us an email. We will try to setup a time and location. We would like to invite anyone who would like to share success stories using Mini Analysis Program at this symposium. We can arrange 10-15 minute presentation. Please let is know if you are interested. The symposium will be held in a room for at least 100 people. There is no reservation required, but last year we ran out seats and had some people standing in the back. So please be prompt. Like last year there will be a sign up sheet for attendees and anyone signs up will be entitled for a free copy of Easy Articles. More detailed description of the event will be available before the neuroscience meeting. 2. Sophisticated Burst Analysis. In version 5.3, Mini Analysis took a quantum leap in burst analysis. The program now finds events within a burst, marks them as 254 (designated for burst group) and generates a sophisticated, and detailed burst analysis report, which includes all the necessary parameters for each event within a burst, such as inter-event intervals, inter-burst intervals, amplitudes, thresholds, 10-90 risetimes, total number of events in a burst, etcs. Burst analysis can be run from Events->Burst Analysis and reports menu in the main window. Follow the instructions and the program will give you option to save the reports as an ASCII file. Don't forget the fact that you can also plot these parameters by burst numbers. Check out the new Plot functions specific for Burst parameters. After you run the Burst Analysis, you will notice that each bursting event is displayed as "B.x.x" where x's designate the number of burst and event within a burst. For those who study spontaneous action potentials, and want to calculate the peak amplitude from the threshold, we have added a convenient function called "Scan and Adjust Baseline for Threshold" under Events menu. This function will go through each and every detected event and change the baseline to threshold and recalculate all the other parameters, including peak amplitude, 10-90 risetime and etc. 3. ABF Utility: convert many more files. ABF Utility added many more files to recognize and convert to ABF files. The following is the list of new files added; CED Signal CSF file SCAN Axograph Axon Imaging Workbench Non-ratiometric Data ADI Chart for Windows new file format. From the Unknow Binary conversion option; 1)you can now convert single precision data files (32bit) from the Unknown Binary option. This is useful for LabView files. 2) you can safely convert multiple channel data 3) It also recognizes wintida files with 16 integer format and prompt the user. If you simply want to change the unit or scale factor of existing ABF file, there is a handy button in ABF Utility to achieve this. If you happen to have Chart for Mac (MacLab) files and would like to convert to ABF, you need to obtain Chart for Mac module that converts these files to Chart for Windows (from ADI). Then these Chart for Windows files can be converted to ABF files using ABF Utiltiy. Please inquire about these files. If you have your own files to convert, please let us know and we will try our best to accomodate your files. 4. Noise Analysis. As we promised in the last year's symposium, we are developing the noise analysis part of the Mini Analysis Program. In the latest version, the Mini Analysis main window got a menu called "Noise Analysis", which shows our commitment to pursue these features. Currently, the stationary and non-stationary noise analysis options are available but it can only generate the variance mean plots. It will be finished by this year's neuroscience meeting. The more robust and complete noise analysis features will be available in the next release of Channelab, shortly after this newsletter. There is also a new command under Noise Analysis menu called "Noise-Amplitude frequency histogram". This function generates amplitude frequency histogram of every points in the window within the range of two horizontal cursors. The two vertical cursors will set the baseline area and the histogram will be baseline subtracted using this baseline. New functions are added to display, import, and save mean subtraced trace. This can be useful for stationary noise analysis. 5. Compare by Group. When you have marked your events as many groups, you want to be able to compare certain parameters among different groups. For example, you have marked 10 different groups by their amplitudes and you want to compare the groups by 10-90 rise time. You can now easily achieve this by running "Compare Groups" command under Events menu. 6. Improvements in Group Analysis. In the Group analysis->Exponential Decay Fitting, the program tries to find the peak first and then fit the decay from the peak to the end of trace. It used to be that if there is a double peak the program get confused and use the second peak as the peak. In the new version, you can display cursors and set the range to find the peaks and the program will try to look for a peak within the range. In the Action Potential Waveform Analysis, the threshold calculation is changed from 5th derivative=0 to 3rd derivative=0. AP Analysis changed the threshold detection to 3rd derivative from 5th. In addition, Peak to AHP 90% value is added during the analysis and reported in the results spreadsheet. In the Amperometry Analysis, manual detection reports the onset of peak. 7. New Display functions in Main Window. In the new version, users can display multiple channel recordings in the same display window. This feature has been requested by several users who wanted to look at synchrony of activities from multiple cells. Users can now display and change the gain and offset of each channel independently. We have added two vertical measuring cursors in the main and group analysis display window. They measure the amplitudes and time of the points that the cursors cross over the trace. The values are displayed in the skyblue labels in the right-lower corner. Now there is a convenient function to remove duplicates. Another convenient function called, "Scan and Adjust Baseline" is added. See Topic 2, Burst Analysis. 8. Bugs fixed. Fixed multiple channel display freezing problem when changing block size. Bug fixed for group analysis ascii save. Save settings fixed. 9. Lab site license. We now offer lab site license for those who are in need for multiple copies of the program. One lab site license entitles up to 10 copies of the program installed one lab computers, notebook computers, and home computers. The cost is $1000.00 and we will deduct any previously purchased amount. For example if you already paid for 2 copies at $500, you will only need to pay $500 more to convert to a lab site license. 10. Too many references to list. Mini Analysis now boasts more than 100 journal articles with a reference to Mini Analysis Program in major journals. Here are some statistics. As of July 2001, there has been 3 articles from Nature 1 from Science 15 from Neuron 9 from Nature Neuroscience 29 from Journal of Neuroscience 14 from Journal of Physiology 22 from Journal of Neurophysiology 3 from PNAS 29 from ScienceDirect Journals. These are results of searches at journal websites for "synaptosoft or mini analysis" search phrase. More are coming out as we speak. Check out the reference list from our website at http://www.synaptosoft.com/MiniAnalysis/References.html. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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@synaptosoft.com. Synaptosoft Inc. 3098 Anderson Place Decatur, GA 30033 phone: 770-939-6344 fax: 770-939-9478 http://www.synaptosoft.com http://www.MiniAnalysis.com http://www.PeakAnalysis.com http://www.EasyArticles.com ftp://ftp.synaptosoft.com mailto:Webmaster@synaptosoft.com