Human neurobalstoma cells, SH-SY5Y, are widely studied and data on their electrophysiological characteristics can be found in literature. We used this cell line to set up the whole cell patch-clamp technique, not yet available in our institute, with the goal to make it suitable both for our future scientific projects and for interdisciplinary studies with other research groups. Some instruments...

A modular patch-clamp amplifier was constructed based on the Strickholm design, which was initially published in 1995. Various parts of the amplifier such as the power supply, input circuit, headstage, feedback circuit, output and nulling circuits were redesigned to use recent software advances and fabricated using the common lithographic printed circuit board fabrication process and commercial...

The patch-clamp technique has revolutionized studies of ion channels in a wide variety of cells. Its development in the late 1970s and early 1980s made it possible to analyze the currents of single ion channels. However, electrophysiological recordings of these proteins were limited to the plasma-membrane of living cells: the small size and the doublemembrane organization of some cell organelle...

The conventional patch-clamp technique requires well-trained experimenter. Few commercial automated patch-clamp systems, designed for drug development, are better suited for large-scale research then for standard electrophysiological experiments. Here we describe a state machine for automated recognition of recording states of the patch-clamp experiment. The principle of the state machine is ba...

The activity of the cardiac Na(+)/Ca(2+) exchanger (NCX1.1) undergoes continuous modulation during the contraction-relaxation cycle because of the accompanying changes in the electrochemical gradients for Na(+) and Ca(2+). In addition, NCX1.1 activity is also modulated via secondary, ionic regulatory mechanisms mediated by Na(+) and Ca(2+). In an effort to evaluate how ionic regulation influenc...