Electrophysiological recordings from neonatal neocortical brain slices

Many brain processes and the expression of many neuronal proteins are developmentally regulated; therefore, studying cellular and molecular processes in tissue from very young animals is vital to understanding the development of the brain. Working on tissue from very young animals (first postnatal week) presents a number of specific problems. This unit describes techniques to overcome these problems to produce in vitro slices from neonatal rodents and to reliably achieve high-quality patch-clamp recordings from neurons in neonatal brain slices.