Abstract
A technical problem associated with the patch clamp technique has been the changing of solutions bathing the membrane patch. The simple technique described here solves this problem by means of a movable polythene sleeve placed on the shaft of the patch clamp pipette. The sleeve is initially placed so that the tip of the pipette is exposed. A gigaohm seal is formed using standard techniques. The patch is then excised and the sleeve is slipped down a few mm past the end of the tip of the pipette. When the pipette and sleeve is now removed from the solution, a small drop of solution covering the membrane patch is held in place at the end of the sleeve by surface tension. The pipette is then easily transferred to a different solution without passing the membrane patch through the air-water interface. The sleeve is then simply pulled back up the pipette shaft to expose the membrane patch to the new solution.
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Quartararo, N., Barry, P.H. A simple technique for transferring excised patches of membrane to different solutions for single channel measurements. Pflugers Arch. 410, 677–678 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00581332
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00581332