Concepts for Patch-Clamp Recording of Whole-Cell and Single-Channel K⁺Currents in Cardiac and Vascular Myocytes

Abstract

The development of the patch-clamp technique (Hamill et al., 1981; Neher and Sakmann, 1976) in the mid-1970s and early 1980s by Bert Sakmann and Erwin Neher, the Nobel laureates for physiology and medicine of 1991, in parallel with the development of methods to disperse single cells from complex organs, has revolutionized our knowledge about the proteins that regulate transmembrane flux of ions across biological membranes. Its widespread implementation in the 1980s initially served to identify and characterize the various ion channels present in the membrane of various cell types. In the 1990s, molecular identification of several genes encoding for ion channel and transporter proteins provided electrophysiologists with new tools to unravel protein behavior at an unprecedented level of resolution. With the explosion of new information regarding their encoding sequences at the nucleotide and amino acid levels, these proteins can now be expressed and functionally studied in different cell types (Xenopus oocytes, mammalian cell lines, etc.), mutated, and even crystallized (Doyle et al., 1998) for investigation of the molecular domains responsible for their behavior in their normal environment.