Physiology Lab Sessions

The physiology lab course allows students to record cardiac action potentials in a frog’s heart using the intracellular microelectrode technique. This is a qualitative and quantitative method for measuring the electrical activity of the heart muscle.

The goal is to have students conduct an experiment under the same conditions as those used in a laboratory—from setup, data collection, and analysis to data presentation—culminating in a group oral presentation.

The experiments involve evaluating the side effects of molecules on cardiac electrical activity by recording action potentials and studying changes in specific parameters of those potentials. This type of study allows researchers to understand how the side effects of molecules under development for therapeutic use in humans or animals are assessed on the cardiovascular system during the preclinical phase.

Basic knowledge of the physiology of the body’s major systems and the physiology of the cardiovascular system, which is typically taught to students in their second and third years of a bachelor’s degree program.

Recommended Prerequisites: There are no recommended prerequisites; all students in the first year of the Master’s in Health Biology, regardless of their track, may take this course unit. For some of these tracks, the fundamentals of electrophysiology were covered in the third year of the Bachelor’s program and are a plus but not required to take this course unit.

An oral exam before a panel of instructors is conducted in groups, with a grade assigned to each student in the group and to each group as a whole.