Application of patch clamp methods to the study of calcium currents and calcium channels.

This chapter will not provide a detailed description of patch clamp methodology, since this information can be found in many other sources. The most comprehensive description of these techniques is likely to be Single Channel Recording (Neher and Sakmann, 1983). Other useful reference works include volumes edited by Standen et al. (l987), Conn (l99l), Kettenmann and Gratyn (1992), and Bean (1992). We describe how these techniques can be applied to the