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Updated: Oct 20, 2026

Voltage-Dependent Potassium Current Recording on H9c2 Cardiomyocytes via the Whole-Cell Patch-Clamp Technique
Published on: November 11, 2022
A global defect in scaling relationship between electrical activity and availability of muscle sodium channels in
1The Bernard Katz Minerva Center for Cell Biophysics, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Rappaport Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Technion, Haifa 31096, Israel.
Abstract:
Hyperkalemic periodic paralysis (HyperPP) is a hereditary disorder characterized by alternate episodic attacks of muscle weakness and muscle myotonia. The most common mutation associated with HyperPP is a T704M substitution in the skeletal-muscle sodium channel. This mutation increases sodium persistent currents, alters voltage dependence of activation and impairs slow inactivation. The present study shows experimental evidence in support of a potentially important global defect caused by the T704M mutation. While the effective rate of recovery from slow inactivation, in both normal and mutated channels, is related to the duration of past activity by a power law function, the scaling power of the mutated channel is significantly greater. This difference between the channels offers a clue for an explanation to the wide range of time scales, history dependence, and the mixed myotonic/paralysis effect, which mark the clinical picture of HyperPP.
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