Beginner's guide

    1. TaroTools has become a big program, but it is still nothing more than Igor procedures (macros). Users are supposed to be an experienced user of Igor, to properly use TaroTools and benefit from it. Please use TaroTools at your own risk.

    2. Load your experimental data into Igor. If your data are in pClamp 9 (or earlier) format, you can use "Load ABF..." of TaroTools. For other data formats, please take care of this step for yourself. TaroTools will not care about the unit of the wave data. But the x-scaling of waves have to be in ms. To change x-scaling, you can use a utility from TaroTools>Select waves...>Scale waves, as well as Igor Menu>Data>Change Data Scaling….

    3. Open “Select waves” panel. Choose the wave(s) you would like to analyse, by clicking them. (Multiple waves can be chosen by pressing shift key.) Then click the “Detect events” button. (You can close the “Select waves” panel once the Event detection panel appears.) Multiple traces can be loaded but they must have the same length. By the way, the “Select waves” panel can be called either from the TaroTools menu>Select waves… or from the “Load new traces” button in the Event detection panel.

    4. Set the detection parameters (“Threshold” and other things). Details about the parameters are in “Help”. Then press the “Detect Events” button. Repeat this process until you find good parameters.

    5. You can mask and delete events. You can also insert events into the place where you want. You can drag and move events. See “Help” for more information.

    6. Once you have detected all events, click the “Save results” button and give a name to the detection result. I recommend adding “_” at the begging of the name because the name will be a postfix of wave names. Please note that the “Save results” does not save anything to the hard disk. This is a saving within the Igor Experiment. (Actually this is just renaming of wave names, by adding the postfix, so that the program can identify the waves.)

    7. For example, if you put a name “_TEST”, you by now have a bunch of waves that have “_TEST” in their names. See “Help” for the full list. You may want to open the “Select waves” panel again and type “_TEST” in the keyword box to find those waves. Then, for example, you can make a table of these waves by the “Table” button, if you like. You can analyze these waves in your own way. Or use the “Further Analysis” panel.

    8. Now you can close the “Event detection” panel, if you like. There is no “close” button in the panel but you can close the panel by a normal way. There is no need of making a recreation macro of this panel.

    9. The “Further analysis” panel can be called either from TaroTools menu>Further analysis… or from the “Further analysis” button in the Event detection panel. “Further analysis” is designed for analyzing experiments with multiple traces (typically responses are evoked by stimulation). However, it can be used for analyzing a single trace (for example, gap-free data). Select the traces by clicking them, set the time range 1 (typically set the time range of entire trace) and time range 2 (typically the time range where evoked events occur), check the checkboxes whichever you like, then set the name of this analysis, for example “_ANALYSIS1”, and click “OK”. You will see graphs and/or tables will appear. There are also bunch of waves that have “_ANALYSIS1” at the end of their names. See “Help” for the full list.

    10. “Summary list” will give you some overview information of the analysis. This is designed for multiple traces. If “Event number in list” is fixed at “5”, then the summary list shows detailed information of first 5 evoked events of each trace. If it is set “auto”, then the number is set to the maximum event number that occurred in the time range 2. A number less than 5 cannot be chosen. For analysis of single traces, I would fix it to 5.

    11. Of course, there are lots more in TaroTools. Feel free to ask me how to do what you want.