Long-Term Potentiation (LTD)

Electrophysiology involves using electric conductance to measure the electrical activity of cells and tissues in biological samples. It regulates the electrical activity through a change in voltage or electric current. Specifically, in neuronal cells, it helps in the assessment of action potential, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long term depression (LTD)-all of which play an important role in the synaptic activity of the cell. Patch Clamp technique is one of the widely used electrophysiology studies in neuroscience research. It incorporates the use of a microelectrode with a micropipette that allows drawing a small piece of the cell membrane to study the activity of ion channels. This is one of the intracellular methods of examining electrophysiology, although there are several other extracellular methods as well. …show more content…
Surprisingly, long-term depression is absent in MeCP2 null mice, and even the neurotransmission is unaltered in the hippocampus region. Researchers also investigated an alteration in the NMDA receptor in the symptomatic MeCP2 null mice. According to another author Saju Balakrishnan et al., (2016), patch clamp electrophysiology study in the hippocampal CA1 region of the brain reveals that alteration in NMDA receptor may underlie the reduced expression of LTP in MeCP2 null mice. Electrophysiology data also reveals impairments in adenylyl cyclase, cyclic-AMP and PKA function in MeCP2 null mice leading to a reduction in LTP activity. All these existing data’s suggests a possible alteration in the synaptic