Failure effect analysis of patch-clamp electronic instrumentation in electrophysiology experiments

The patch-clamp technique is an extremely powerful and exquisitely sensitive means for studying the biophysics and pharmacology of ion channels. Aiming at acquiring ionic currents, in the range from few pA to nA, while controlling the voltage across the membrane of a biological cell and continuously perfusing physiological solutions containing the molecules under investigation, patch-clamp measurements require: an accurate calibration phase, a low noise front-end, and a temperature control. After describing a patch-clamp electronic system, the paper discusses the most frequently encountered and well-fitting examples of how failures in the electronic instrumentation are related to errors and/or accuracy degradation in the electrophysiological measurement. The paper refers to experimental data recorded with this technique under the whole-cell voltage-clamp configuration.