What is the substance in the pipette?
When you use a patch clamp setup, you place neurons or a slice of brain tissue under a microscope, and you can actually visualize the neuron, and you use micromanipulators, very fine manipulators, to move this glass pipette or electrode to the neuron, and inside the electrode is actually a solution which tries to approximate the internal solution inside a neuron. So the same chemicals and concentration of ions that occur inside the neuron, we put those in the pipette. And then you approach with a micromanipulator up to the neuron and touch this glass electrode up against the surface of the neuron. And then you apply slight suction to the electrode, and you break a hole into the cell, and this makes a continuous solution between the pipette or the electrode and the internal solution of the cell, and in this way you can record the electrical currents in the cell. What other new technologies will be important? Imagining technologies have really incredibly improved over the last decade, an
