Electrical Conductivity of Brain Cortex Slices in Seizing and Non-seizing States

The thesis may be consulted by you, provided you comply with the provisions of the Act and the following conditions of use:  Any use you make of these documents or images must be for research or private study purposes only, and you may not make them available to any other person.  Authors control the copyright of their thesis. You will recognise the author's right to be identified as the author of the thesis, and due acknowledgement will be made to the author where appropriate.  You will obtain the author's permission before publishing any material from the thesis. 2013 ii Dedication Dedication To the soul of my father Mohammed, who continuously supported me with endless generosity and love. I miss you Dad. To my mother Fardous To my wife Noha To my son Ahmed To my daughter Salma To my sisters: Mona, Rokaia, Eman and Asmaa To my brother Anas Thank you for your support and patience. Acknowledgements iii Acknowledgements I may not have been able to complete this thesis without help from many great people. I am grateful for everyone who helped me in this work. I am lucky being surrounded by these helpful professionals. Special thanks to chief supervisor Dr Marcus Wilson, I am glad being his student. He is always available, is friendly and helps me. I would like to thank Associate Professor Alistair Steyn-Ross for supervising and solving my personal issues. Dr Logan Voss is the dark horse of this work. He trained me and helped me a lot in the biological section and put considerable efforts into editing it. Bubanja for introducing me to the van der Pauw method, Dr Hunt for helping in statistics and Ehsan with Matlab. I am glad to have great technicians here, Ian Honey, Stewart Finlay and Luke van de Pas. They were always happy to help. Abstract Abstract The electrical conductivity of thin living slices of mouse cerebral cortex is measured. Two only out of fifteen different attempting ways were effective. I have successfully measured the electrical conductivity of mouse brain cortex in seizing and non-seizing conditions. The first successful approach is called the van der Pauw method, where four silver-silver chloride cylindrical wire electrodes were immersed in full length at the corners of the sample. The second is a one-dimensional technique where two flat electrodes were placed on either face of the 400 m thick samples. …