Learning resources for electrophysiology (DRG and spinal cord slices)

Electrophysiology is really powerful and forms a core element of most neuroscience. Many of the best pain papers contain some e-phys to interrogate mechanisms.

Let’s say you’re a first year grad student and you wanted to do electrophysiology for pain research, which means mostly looking at cultured dissociated DRGs or spinal cord slices. How would you begin your learning? What resources are there? Key books, videos or courses? Of course, probably the most important thing is to have experienced electrophysiologists nearby to show you the ropes, but in addition to that, what are the best ways to learn how to do e-phys?

@janehartung @YongHo @diliu @fmoehring @mny3

Actually, to begin to answer my own question, here are some resources I’ve found helpful.



The first text I probably read was Patch Clamping: An Introductory Guide to Patch Clamp Electrophysiology by Areles Molleman. It is a very light text that will cover the basics.

For a deeper treatment Single-channel recording by Sakmann and Neher is a great reference to have for any electrophysiologist.

The Axon Guide, which can be found online as a pdf pretty easily on the molecular devices website, also gives a good overview of electrophysiology.

Molecular devices also has a number of webinars on different topics in electrophysiology that can provide some detail on particular aspects of the technique but they are often geared towards their own software suite (pclamp).

All three texts cover the basic set-up as well as different variations of the technique in varying degrees of detail.

That’s great stuff @mny3. That’s exactly what I was looking for. Very useful!

I’m going to check out the Patch Clamping Guide by Molleman.