Automated Glass Pipette-Based Patch-Clamp Techniques

Patch clamping facilitates directly controlling the voltage of a cell and thus has been acknowledged to be the gold standard for assessing ion-channel physiology in academic and industrial laboratories. The method was developed 30 years ago by (1976 ), and its various different configurations with glass electrodes have been successfully applied in many labs worldwide (Hamill et al., 1981 ). The standard approach of patch clamping is done completely manually and requires expensive equipment, such as microscopes, micromanipulators, antivibration tables, and Faraday cages. Further, manual operation is time-consuming, requires experienced personnel, and accommodates only a low amount of throughput per day.