Patch Clamping Unhooked

ﾩ 2006 ELSEVIER INC.

Direct electrophysiological measurement of neuronal activity in living, breathing animals is challenging. Making such measurements on freely moving, behaving animals has been next to impossible. But recently a research group in The Netherlands and Germany that includes patch-clamp pioneer Bert Sakmann devised a contraption that can take whole-cell recordings from freely moving rats. ¹ "The potential of this is huge," says Faculty of 1000 member Gerald Zamponi, of the department of physiology and biophysics at the University of Calgary.

"If you want to know how a neuron does its job under real conditions, having a brain slice is a great thing, but you can't do behavior on a brain slice? Now, I can't tell you how easy it is to do this. It looks like it's not that trivial. ? Everything had to be miniaturized because when we do experiments in the lab, we have massive micromanipulators that we use to position our patch pipettes?. They have to do this with a much, much smaller scale. Then they have to attach this to the animal so that it doesn't move when the animal moves. They had to overcome stimulus artifacts? And apart from the fact that they built it, they got data out of it." (Click here for more on patch-clamping)