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Electronic Design of the Patch Clamp

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Single-Channel Recording

Abstract

The patch-clamp amplifier is fundamentally a sensitive current-to-voltage converter, converting small (picoampere to nanoampere) pipette currents into voltage signals that can be observed with an oscilloscope or sampled by a computer. This chapter describes the basic principles of the current-to-voltage (I–V) converter and describes some of the technology of I–V converters having wide bandwidth and low noise. Also considered in this chapter are additions to the basic I–V converter design for capacitive-transient cancellation and series-resistance compensation, features that are particularly useful for whole-cell current recording.

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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Sigworth, F.J. (1995). Electronic Design of the Patch Clamp. In: Sakmann, B., Neher, E. (eds) Single-Channel Recording. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1229-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1229-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1230-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-1229-9

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