Dry beveling micropipettes using a computer hard drive

It is sometimes useful in electrophysiological recordings to try various micropipette profiles in order to determine which tip works best in a given experiment. A pipette puller can be used to pull very sharp or blunt pipettes, and to fire polish tips for whole cell patch recordings. Broken tip pipettes can be "bumped" to an acceptable tip diameter under a microscope. However, it may be difficult to rationalize the purchase of a commercial beveling machine simply to test whether beveled pipettes are best for recording intracellularly from the cell types of interest. Presented here are methods that use a surplus computer hard drive to reproducibly dry bevel glass micropipettes. Compared to sharp or broken tip electrodes, pipettes dry beveled with this simple system are superior for making intracellular recordings from cichlid Mauthner neurons. Preliminary data obtained with this inexpensive apparatus may allow investigators to successfully justify the purchase of a commercial beveler.