Electrophysiological variability in the SH-SY5Y cellular line

The basic electrophysiological properties of SH-SY5Y tumour cells have been studied by whole cell patch-clamp in voltage clamp configuration. The results shown the existence of a large variability of the response among individual cells in the same experimental conditions. Experiments conducted by using different ionic concentrations of the recording pipette filling solution, yielded a significant variability of peak current amplitude for all the filling solutions used. In addition, variability among groups was detected. The inter-group variability was not dependent on the different ionic components among the groups. Our results confirm earlier findings that this cell line is not constituted of an uniform population of cells. Moreover, from the present results we can conclude that these cells have diverse regulatory patterns of membrane conductance, probably due to both the expression as well as a non precise regulation of the membrane density of the different channels.