Guide to Electrophysiological Recording
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41
Chapter 4
After achieving stable whole-cell access, press the Auto button in the Whole Cell
section of the MultiClamp Commander to compensate the whole-cell capacitance
transient. It may be necessary to manually adjust the Whole Cell pF and M
Ω
values
for optimal compensation, and to readjust the Cp Fast values slightly. You should end
up with a reasonably square current step, the amplitude of which reflects the input
resistance of the cell. (See Chapter 3,
TUTORIAL 4
.) The Whole Cell pF and M
Ω
values are estimates of, respectively, the cell’s membrane capacitance and the access
resistance due to the electrode plus any resistive contribution from the cell’s contents.
The access resistance is typically about 3 times the electrode resistance, if a clean
“break-in” has been achieved. Access can sometimes be improved by applying further
pulses of suction or, more dangerously, by brief pulses of pressure.
Whenever voltage clamping in whole-cell mode, it is advisable to use Rs compensation
to minimize the voltage drop across the access resistance. A common mistake is to
assume that this Rs error is small, so as to avoid the fiddly process of setting Rs
compensation. This is false economy. Rs errors can be surprisingly large and can
easily render your hard-won data meaningless. We strongly recommend that Rs
compensation be used, at least to convince yourself that its use is unnecessary in your
particular case. The theory and practice of Rs compensation are described in
Chapter 5,
SERIES RESISTANCE COMPENSATION
.
The Leak Subtraction feature of the MultiClamp 700A allows you to subtract linear
leak currents from the membrane current traces. Generally speaking it is not a good
idea to do this in the whole-cell configuration, because whole cells may contain
background currents that have some dependence on voltage. Software packages like
pCLAMP allow a user-specified after-the-fact leakage correction, which is a much
safer procedure.