Alfaxalone is an effective anesthetic for the electrophysiological study of anoxia-tolerance mechanisms in western painted turtle pyramidal neurons.

Anoxia in the mammalian brain leads to hyper-excitability and cell death; however, this cascade of events does not occur in the anoxia-tolerant brain of the western painted turtle, Chrysemys picta belli. The painted turtle has become an important anoxia-tolerant model to study brain, heart, and liver function in the absence of oxygen, but being anoxia-tolerant likely means that decapitation alone is not a suitable method of euthanasia. Many anesthetics have long-term effects on ion channels and are not appropriate for same day experimentation. Using whole-cell electrophysiological techniques, we examine the effects of the anesthetic, Alfaxalone, on pyramidal cell action potential amplitude, threshold, rise and decay time, width, frequency, whole cell conductance, and evoked GABAA receptors currents to determine if any of these characteristics are altered with the use of Alfaxalone for animal sedation. We find that Alfaxalone has no long-term impact on action potential parameters or whole-cell conductance. When acutely applied to naïve tissue, Alfaxalone did lengthen GABAA receptor current decay rates by 1.5-fold. Following whole-animal sedation with Alfaxalone, evoked whole cell GABAA receptor current decay rates displayed an increasing trend with 1 and 2 hours after brain sheet preparation, but showed no significant change after a 3-hour washout period. Therefore, we conclude that Alfaxalone is a suitable anesthetic for same day use in electrophysiological studies in western painted turtle brain tissue.