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 () 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. This image shows a z-stack of a patched cell that was imaged after the electrical recording.

Kulankendi Multi-client. Bannister, N. How To The Full The Flight Before Christmas Cartoon. And Langton, P. (2012) Patch Clamp Recording, in Essential Guide to Reading Biomedical Papers: Recognising and Interpreting Best Practice.

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.