Patch-clamp electrophysiology, one of the most powerful methods in neuroscience, and true a workhorse technique in the field, was on the verge of falling out of fashion 30-some years technique and its creators earned a Nobel Prize. In a new form described by Nature Methods author Vivien Marx as “a younger cousin,” called Patch-seq, it is being nudged back into vogue.
Simpler to master, “the technique links patch clamping to single-cell transcriptomics approaches that have been advanced by Karolinska Institutet scientists Sten Linnarsson, Rickard Sandberg and many others,” writes Marx.
Cembrowski says that studying the brain in ever greater multimodal detail can, for example, reveal that cells “classically” lumped together are actually different cell types1. One can query the rules governing those variations. Such insights shed light on the neuronal underpinnings of brain feats such as memory, spatial navigation and learning.