Blockade of the cardiac ion channel coded by human ether-à-gogo-related gene (hERG) can lead to cardiac arrhythmia, which has become a major concern in drug discovery and development. Automated electrophysiological patch clamp allows assessment of hERG channel effects early in drug development to aid medicinal chemistry programs and has become routine in pharmaceutical companies. However, a num...

Background: The consideration of neurons as coupled mechanical-electrophysiological systems is supported by a growing body experimental evidence, including observations that cell membranes mechanically deform during the propagation an action potential. However, short-term (seconds to minutes) influence membrane voltage on mechanical properties neuron at single-cell level remains unknown. Materi...

Upon ejaculation, mammalian spermatozoa have to undergo a sequence of physiological transformations within the female reproductive tract that will allow them to reach and fertilize the egg. These include initiation of motility, hyperactivation of motility and perhaps chemotaxis toward the egg, and culminate in the acrosome reaction that permits sperm to penetrate the protective vestments of the...

Traditionally the vertical slice and the whole-mount preparation of the retina have been used to study the function of retinal circuits. However, many of retinal neurons, such as amacrine cells, expand their dendrites horizontally, so that the morphology of the cells is supposed to be severely damaged in the vertical slices. In the whole-mount preparation, especially for patch-clamp recordings,...

royan b 1 stem cell can be differentiated to specialized cell types including cardiomyocytes. this developmental change is accompanied with expression of various k + channel types. the aim of this study was to detect functional expression of k + currents from stem cell stage and one week and two weeks after differentiation into cardiomyocyte. mouse stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (es-cardiomyo...

Activation of the parasympathetic nervous system has been reported to have an antiarrhythmic role during ischemia–reperfusion injury by decreasing arrhythmia triggers. Furthermore, it was that neurotransmitter acetylcholine is able modulate ATP-dependent potassium current (I K-ATP ), a crucial activated hypoxia. However, possible significance this modulation in mechanism not fully clarified. Ac...

Ion channels provide the basis for the regulation of electrical excitability in the central and peripheral nervous systems. This review deals with the techniques that make the study of structure and function of single channel molecules in living cells possible. These are the patch clamp technique, which was derived from the conventional voltage clamp method and is currently being developed for ...

Kv2.1, the voltage-gated ion channel, is ubiquitously expressed in variety of tissues and dysfunction of this ion channel is responsible for multiple diseases. Electrophysiological properties of ion channels are so far characterized with eukaryotic cells using the manual patch clamp which requires skilful operators and expensive equipments. In this research, we created a simple and sensitive dr...