Activation and Inactivation Kinetics of the Potassium Channels KV1.3 and KV1.5 Measured on the CytoPatchTM Instrument and the Manual Patch Clamp: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The state of the art method to study ion channels is the patch clamp technology. Since 2003, patch clamp automats offered an efficiently faster analysis method, as it would have been feasible with the manual patch clamp technique. Nevertheless, the advantage of higher throughput in patch clamp automation is accompanied with a lower data quality.The CytoPatchTM Instrument is a patch clamp automat with a new chip technology, the Cytocentering Technology. With this, the automat is capable to generate a data quality and flexibility comparable to the manual patch clamp technology.To investigate this issue we carried out a comparative study on the activation and inactivation kinetics of the potassium channels KV1.3 and KV1.5 measured on the CytoPatchTM Instrument and the manual patch clamp. The data prove that advanced electrophysiological studies can be carried out on the CytoPatchTM Instrument with similar results to the manual patch clamp technique. Furthermore, it goes along with the benefit of automation which is: a higher standardisation - walk away times of several hours - automated data evaluation - no need of a highly-skilled person to run the instrument - higher throughput and lower costs per data point.