How are sights, sounds and smells converted into electrical signals in a form that can be interpreted by the nervous system? This process called sensory transduction began to be understood only recently as a result of the development of the techniques of patch-clamp recording and gene cloning.Beginning with fundamental properties of ion channels and G-protein coupled signal cascades, Sensory Transduction provides a comprehensive survey of this new knowledge that, taken as a whole, represents one of the greatest achievements of modern biology and neuroscience: the unravelling of the mechanism of sensation.