Direct electrophysiological measurement of neuronal activity in living, breathing animals is challenging. Making such measurements on freely moving, behaving animals has been next to impossible. But recently a research group in The Netherlands and Germany that includes patch-clamp pioneer Bert Sakmann devised a contraption that can take whole-cell recordings from freely moving rats.
"If you want to know how a neuron does its job under real conditions, having a brain slice is a great thing, but you can't do behavior on a brain slice? Now, I can't tell you how easy it is to do this. It looks like it's not that trivial. ? Everything had to be miniaturized because when we do experiments in the lab, we have massive micromanipulators that we use to ...
