What is voltage clamp and patch clamp? Brief description of its principle and Application
Erwin Nell (Erwin Neher) and Bert (Bert Sakinann). Sackmann developed based on patch clamp voltage clamp (patch clamp) technology, the cell membrane by the larger microelectrode and neurons closely contact, a high impedance sealing area is formed between the two. As a result, the microelectrode enters the cell with a low impedance electrical resistivity (right). The patch clamp can not only observe the single ion channel currents, and there are a variety of models can be easily carried out on cell voltage clamp and current clamp, observation of ion currents and its regulation, and combined with the molecular structure and function of ion channels and receptors and molecular biology technology, widely used in neurobiology, physiology, pharmacology and other fields. They received the Nobel prize in physiology for medicine in 1991.
It can be used to determine the ionic current when the cells are excited. The change of membrane permeability is rapid, but if a high frequency response amplifier is used, the injection current can be adjusted continuously, rapidly and automatically so as to keep the membrane potential constant. It can measure the membrane potential, membrane current and postsynaptic potential of cells.
The voltage clamp technique (voltage clamp) is inserted through a intracellular microelectrode to intracellular supplement current, current amount of ions across the membrane is exactly equal to the reverse flow, so that even if the membrane permeability changes, can also control the membrane potential value unchanged. The ion flow through the ion channel is equal in number to the current applied by the microelectrode.
