Electrophysiology

Patch-clamp and single-channel electrophysiology concepts are relevant to nanopore measurements. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Electrophysiology is part of the Nanopore Wiki learning path. Electrophysiology provides the low-noise electrical measurement framework used by many single-pore nanopore experiments.

Core concepts

• A voltage clamp can hold transmembrane voltage while measuring current.
• Single-channel recordings require stable membranes, clean electrodes, shielding, and low-noise amplifiers.
• Current traces contain baseline current, event signals, drift, and noise components.
• Metadata such as voltage, bandwidth, sampling rate, temperature, and buffer must be recorded.

Measurement workflow

Step	Description
1	Prepare the chamber, electrodes, buffer, and shielding.
2	Form or verify a membrane or chip-supported pore system.
3	Measure baseline current and RMS noise before adding sample.
4	Record events and annotate changes in voltage, sample addition, and pore state.

Typical applications

• Biological nanopore recordings.
• Single-channel sensing and pore engineering.
• Quality control before event detection.

Common pitfalls

• Ignoring electrode drift and grounding artifacts.
• Failing to distinguish membrane rupture, pore insertion, and sample events.
• Reporting traces without acquisition settings.

Related pages

• Fundamentals
• Noise and filtering
• Bilayer formation
• Event detection

References

• Patch clamp
• Electrophysiology