The Patch-Clamp facility provides investigators at Morehouse School of Medicine the capability to explore at the cellular level ionic mechanisms that may be involved in their research problems. Experimental conditions can be set up with specific bath and intracellular solutions to isolate Ca, K, Cl, Na or cation currents.
Experiments can be temperature-controlled and bath perfusion is possible.
The director and a research assistant are available to service other investigators in their projects. The continued presence of Research Assistant, Esther Carlisle Doele, has increased the ability to handle our present work-load in the core facility. In the last six months, she has begun to learn single-channel recording and analysis of that data. The patch-clamp software on the desktop computer does not permit simultaneous data acquisition and analysis. The portability of the laptop is important since a large investment of time is devoted by the Core Director for data analysis.