Ever since I my interested in neuroscience become more serious, I was fascinated by the patch clamp technique, especially applied for the whole cell. Calcium imaging or multi-channel electrophysiology (recent review) is the way to go in order to get an idea what a neuronal population is doing on the single-cell level, but it occludes fast dynamics like bursting, fast oscillations and subthreshold membrane potential dynamics (calcium imaging), or unambiguous assignment of activity to single neurons (multi-channel ephys). That’s exactly what whole-cell patch clamp can do (and much more).

Some months ago, I started using the technique on an adult zebrafish brain ex vivo preparation. This image shows a z-stack of a patched cell that was imaged after the electrical recording. The surrounding cells are labeled with GCaMP; the brighter labeling of the patched neuron was done by a fluorophor inside the pipette that was diffusing into the cell, with which the pipette ideally forms a single electrical compartment. The fluorophor fills up the soma and some of the dendrites. The pipette position is shown as an overlay in the right-hand side image.

Electrophysiology is a very unrewarding and difficult activity, compared to calcium imaging. The typical, old-school electrophysiologist is always alone with his rig, through long nights of a never-ending series of failures, intercepted by few successfully patched and nicely behaving neurons. On average, frustration dominates, no matter how successful he/she is in the end; as a consequence, he fiercely protects his rig from anybody else who wants to touch it and might interfere with the labile stability of his setup. Therefore, over time, he becomes more and more annoyed by any interaction with fellow humans. At least that is what people say about electrophysiologists …

Despite this asocial component, nothing is more encouraging for beginners like me than hearing from others and about their struggles with electrophysiology. I will therefore write about my own experience with electrophysiology so far, and although I’m lacking the year-long experience of older electrophysiologist, I share my experience with the hope to encourage others.

To begin with, here’s a list of useful books and manuals for learning, if one does not have an experienced colleague who shows every single detail:

• Areles Molleman, Patch Clamping: An Introductory Guide to Patch Clamp Electrophysiology
  A very short book which does not go into the details e.g. of analog electrical circuits of a cell, but gives useful pragmatic advice and how-to-dos for patching (both single channel and whole-cell). Very useful starting point for the beginner.
  .
• In Labtimes, there’s a 2009 short first-hand report [the website is no longer online, but you can access it with the waybackmachine link] by Steven Buckingham that highlights some of the difficulties of patching and gives precise and concise advice.
  .
• The Axon Guide for Electrophysiology & Biophysics Laboratory Techniques
  If you have time for 250 pages of technical descriptions, this is your choice. The document might be quite old, but there haven’t been many revolutions to patching anyway. For several troubleshooting issues, I have found good advice in this document.
  .
• If you are lacking the theoretical background of how neurons, membrane potentials and ions work together, I would recommend online lectures like these slides that have a focus on theoretical underpinnings of measurements and not on measurements and troubleshooting.
  .
• For a more in-depth description of everything related to membrane potentials and ions: Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes (3rd Ed.) by Bertil Hille. It’s 15 years old, but still the best book that I’ve seen so far. Especially for somebody with a physics background, it is very rewarding to read.
  .
• For questions related to applications of patching (and other single neuron-specific tools), I can recommend Dendrites  by Stuart, Spruston, Häusser et al., although I have not yet checked the newest, very recent edition (2016)..

Soon, I hope that I will have time to write about some more technical aspects of patching. (Here about how to remove line-frequency noise that stems from the perfusion pump, about the limitations of quantitative whole cell voltage-clamp recordings, especially in small neurons, about blue light-induced artifacts in whole-cell recordings, and about the look and feel of two-photon targeted patching, including several instructive movies.)