PSYCH 3BN3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Tetraethylammonium, Tetrodotoxin
2 Mar 2014
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Ionic currents across nerve cell membranes: a transient increase in the permeability of the neuronal membrane to na+ initiates the action potential, a key to understanding this phenomenon is the observation that action potentials are initiated only when the neuronal membrane potential becomes more positive than a threshold level, this observation suggests that the mechanism responsible for the increase in. Na+ permeability is sensitive to the membrane potential: the fact that the na+ permeability that generates the membrane potential change is itself sensitive to the membrane potential presents both conceptual and practical obstacles to studying the mechanisms underlying the action potential, a practical problem is the difficulty of systematically varying the membrane potential to study the permeability change, because such changes in membrane potential will produce an action potential, which causes further, uncontrolled changes in the membrane potential, voltage clamp method: a technique that uses electronic feedback to.
