Unlike the genomics revolution, which was largely enabled by a single technological advance (high throughput sequencing), rapid advancement in proteomics will require a broader effort to increase the throughput of a number of key tools for functional analysis of different types of proteins. In the case of ion channels -a class of (membrane) proteins of great physiological importance and potenti...

The conventional patch clamp has long been considered the best approach for studying ion channel function and pharmacology. However, its low throughput has been a major hurdle to overcome for ion channel drug discovery. The recent emergence of higher throughput, automated patch clamp technology begins to break this bottleneck by providing medicinal chemists with high-quality, information-rich d...

embryonic stem cells are capable of differentiating to variety of cell tissues including cardiomyocytes. this developmental change is accompanied with a great deal of ion channel expression and functions. mouse stem cell derived cardiomyocytes were prepared and separated to yield isolated single cell suspension for cell current recording. in the present study some properties of the k + -current...

Much of what we know about the properties of ion channels in cell membranes has come from experiments using voltage clamp. In general, the method allows ion flow across a cell membrane to be measured as electric current, whilst the membrane voltage is held under experimental control with a feedback amplifier. The method was first developed by Cole (1949) and Hodgkin et al. (1952) for use with t...

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,...

Stachniak, Tevye J. E., and Charles W. Bourque. Visually guided whole cell patch clamp of mouse supraoptic nucleus neurons in cultured and acute conditions. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 291: R68–R76, 2006. First published February 9, 2006; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00830.2005.—Recent advances in neuronal culturing techniques have supplied a new set of tools for studying neural tissue, provi...