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Zusammenfassung:
A new era in cell biology has been heralded by the prize‐winning research of Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann. These laureates measured the picoampere currents through individual ion channels (see A, below; ACh = acetylcholine). The breakthrough in suppressing the background noise was achieved by applying a slight suction to the pipette used for the current measurement. This improved the crucial pipette‐to‐membrane seal by two orders of magnitude. In B, below, such a “patch pipette” is shown on the end‐plate membrane of denervated frog muscle fiber. Today the patch‐clamp technique is used routinely with other methods such as DNA recombination or fluorimetric techniques, for example, to study the synaptic transfer in its molecular detail.
